Steph's Reality Blend

In a January flurry (literally and figuratively), Randy and I drove home without kids to make some major headway on the house project. In particular: kitchen cabinets!  Here's the island being assembled at the shop.  The island was our last cabinet to build for the kitchen. And the biggest. And therefore the heaviest. And here it is getting sanded before going home.  Before we brought everything home, we had to make drawer boxes.  We got them all done in about a day with Alan's sweet machinery. Here, Randy is using a machine that routers the ends of each drawer side for a solid, dovetail fit. We had already applied the groove in each piece, in which the drawer bottoms would fit. Some have nubbins, some have spaces. This nifty machine presses the box sides together. We had each drawer's labelled pieces in separate piles, and I would apply glue on the next pieces while Randy pressed a box together.  Don't forget the d...

We celebrated a late Christmas with my family in Wisconsin for the first week of January and left our 3 monkeys with my parents for OVER a week, and then they brought them up to us and stayed a long weekend! So, we had over a week to reallllllly get a lot done. One of the things we needed to do without kids was build more kitchen cabinets, as the cabinet shop is not (legally) kid-friendly. (The kitchen cabinets post Part 2 will come in a bit.) Cute cousin Rachel in Christmas decor  Teddy's 8th birthday cake The biggest task we accomplished together with Mom and Dad was painting almost the whole upstairs. Much paint was found in the "oops paints" sections of various stores. Of course, the final skim coat of mud had to be completed first, which Randy and I got done while we were sans kids. Turns out, applying the final coat of mud with a roller really saves time and our necks and backs. Then I came with my super-wide mud knife and it was basically ...