Sticks, Stones and Sinks

Ed wanted to get the doors on before the cabinets came on Wednesday. Ah, the things we take for granted; true love, hot water, refrigerated food, flush toilets, doors on the bathroom.

For these things, we are grateful.

We bought unfinished fir three panel shaker doors, stained them to match the cabinets, and put on a coat of varethane. There are two closet doors, a bedroom and bathroom door, and a bifold door for the linen closet.

At 10:00 Wednesday morning the Peter and Tom, the cabinet installers, showed up. I was so happy I could have hugged them, but I managed to restrain myself. I won't bore you with a

bunch of pictures of them lugging those things up the stairs. Mostly because I was so scared while they carted them up, I forgot to take pictures.

See that upper cabinet? They brought that up as one unit!

There is a desk area to the far right under the window, and the island will have a 15" bar that extends out behind the stove top.

They installed all the kitchen cabinets, and an upper cabinet and vanity for the bathroom.

Friday I started putting up the El Dorado stone behind where the wood burning stove will go. This is my project, but I don't know how to use the Skil saw, so every time I wanted a stone cut, I'd have to catch Ed between trips up and down stairs to cut one. Either that or ask him to stop what he was doing to make the cut. Word of caution: Do not try to cut these stones with a tile saw. While the tile saw will cut them with no problem, it throws wet ground cement everywhere...shirt, hair, face (remember safety glasses) . There is no conditioner made on this Earth that will take care of hair dipped in wet cement dust. Finally by Saturday afternoon, I worked up the courage to try the Skil saw myself. It's a miracle! I didn't cut my leg off or anything!

We are using the China Beach Stacked stone, and acrylic mastic instead of thinset. Since I'm doing the stone, and I'm relatively clumsy with tools, I didn't want to worry about the thinset setting up too fast. I took several photos of the stone. One shows them more yellow than they are, and one shows them too brown. The true color is somewhere in the middle. By evening my back was barking at me, and I had used both gallons of mastic. I was ready to stop.

Sunday we went into town and bought 10 gallons of mastic, plywood and wonderboard to go down on the kitchen cabinets, and a kitchen sink. It's a Franke granite composite sink. I couldn't wait to see how it would look, so as soon as Ed made the cutout on the plywood, I just had to try it for fit.