So after the last post, it’s not exactly been a hive of progress making activity. And I have to admit, today I’m feeling pretty negative*, more and more I’m finding it hard to feel positive about where the US is going, and more and more I’m finding it hard to feel positive about my place here in the US. And where might be a good place in the world seems to elude me right now.
Anyhow, enough of that.
Let’s talk about some positive things. We got the bathroom cabinet up:
I love the combination of modern colour with its very vintage look. The mirror is the first permanently installed mirror we’ve put in this house, which is kind of odd. It’s really shoddy, mirror wise, probably because while I’m not wholly convinced its the original mirror, its definitely ancient, and the silvering has no protective coating on it.
And Kathryn’s been busy painting the “tiles” that go on the side of the media stand. These are the patterned ones, and they’re actually painted with copper over the white (which is done now), so we can hopefully start putting these on next week. That’s quite exciting :)
We’ve also done a *ton* of work on the garden – moved the fences around (and made new fences), so that the beds are all gathered together which allows us to get to the plants to weed and water, it allows us to keep the chickens out (we hope), and so hopefully we’ll actually get a fair amount of veg out of it.
The big thing we’ve done is got the first shelf up:
That led to a lot of debate, because it’s really dramatically changed the space. It makes the kitchen feel way more ‘kitcheny’, and also it feels more enclosed. It’s amazing how much of a difference it’s actually made to the space. So after a lot of debate, we decided not to go ahead and put up the second shelf below it, and also not to put up the one planned to go opposite.
Of course…this leads to a storage issue, so I really do need to get it together and install the pull out pantry (which means making the frame for the pull-out pantry), and actually build the shelves for it (since they weren’t available from the company selling the frame, with the frame being discontinued – and frankly, the frame was the wrong size but was the nearest I could manage without spending literally $1k).
The other thing is that we bought the brackets – and we like the brackets… but then one of us (probably Kathryn) realized that we could trade our dining area single planned bookshelf for two shorter shelves on that same wall – one above the other with a section of overlap – which would give us actually a little more space. Although how the light works is still going to take a bit of finicking, since it was originally planned to be part of the shelf. Well, the light was attached to a structure that was part of the shelf.
To work towards that goal I just finished joining the second two boards together – and realized that I could use part of the left-overs from the first board (if my wife agrees) to make the window shelf in the (main) bathroom.
This second shelf went better than the first. I suspect if you have a decent workshop (like Laura Kampf does), then you can get a really almost seamless join using her method. But even with my sketch approach to it, the second run of the process has produced a really pretty close join.
I’ve also put up the very first bit of horizontal trim in the bathroom – to cover the join between the top half of the wall and the tiles. It’s pleasing to see it in place, but does mean (yet again) that I need to run out and buy some more wood so I can trim around the window. Progress is progress though, and getting the house done is reassuring in terms of “oh, hey, if we have to basically flee a fascist hellscape, we can do that”.
There’s some geeky computer news, but I’ll put that in a different place for to save y’all who aren’t into that from having to read it.
*GM just decided to use the fashy king’s charging connector because they’d rather tie themselves to Tesla than invest in charging infrastructure themselves…*sigh* All of which means more instability in EV adoption in the US – for at least 2 more years. Which is obviously fiiiiine, because it’s not like climate change is a pressing problem**.
** Well, I started this post on a day I was feeling sucky, but I’m finishing it up on Sunday, after a pretty nice day with my best beloved. So if it seems like I’ve had a massive moodswing mid-post, then that’s why.