Vacation!
Well, not mine!
The girls are off on their summer vacation with their mother to North Carolina, though this week is only eight days instead of the usual fourteen or so because of work issues. Still, when the girls are away, dad gets stuff done. This vacation has two projects in store for me around the house to get done with my partner in crime, Kim.
The first one is making another big move with the kitchen. after removing two of the smaller cabinets a few months ago and replacing one of them with shelves for glasses that are used frequently, we tore down the rest of the cabinets today and all the goods are on the dining room table for the duration. My silly male preference is just to put up shelves for everything, but I know it’s not feasible, even if it’d be neat and work for just me. Getting all the cabinetry down went well with only one minor dent in the wall overall. After getting the stove moved out, it all went pretty quickly. The real work though was in dealing with the tile on the wall. This is the old pinkish stuff that was put on there when the house was built in 1969. The wall is in good shape underneath and it just took some time to chisel off the remaining glue there and to sand it down.
The really nervous effort with all of this though was at the start. The over the stove fan/vent there hasn’t been used in years because it’s not that good and didn’t work properly. The thing wasn’t tied to any specific breaker though on the fuse box, and it was a game of hide and seek to try and find the right one so that I could kill the power to it, yank it off the wall and cap the wires. I ended up having to turn off the master power in order to do it and that just made me hella nervous. But it got done, safely capped and dealt with. What I really liked is that I got one of those mesh patches to put on the wall to deal with the holes where the wires were coming in from. I got the plaster/putty stuff before, but while picking it up today, I saw they had a spray on version as well so I tried that and it looks like it’ll work pretty well.
So now we wait to paint everything in that area tomorrow after another round of sanding and then when that’s dry, we can start picking up the cabinets and seeing how well it goes with installing those.
That’s just the first project for me this week. The second one is painting Miria’s bedroom. Last summer, in her old room before she moved this June into Amethyst’s old room, I gave her what she really wanted with a red and black painted room, her vampire room. Admittedly, she grew out of it pretty quickly, but she definitely loved it and I know I can always say, “Remember when I gave you your red room?” when other parents would flatly say no. Amethyst’s old room was done in an soft yellow that just ended up looking dark and dirty no matter how clean it was. It’s also not a color that really fits for Miria. While I had wanted her to pick them out with me, she did give me permission to get the paints after describing what I wanted to do, so it should work well.
She’s getting two walls opposite of each other in a shade of deep blue while the other two facing walls will be done in green. I’ll be adding an opposite color stripe through each of the walls as well to tie it all together. I’m looking forward to getting this done since it should really make the room hers, fit with her bedding and give it something special for her. I stressed to her that in the winter, I wanted her room to have lighter colors that would be spring-like so that it would be bright (but not too bright) and inviting and a welcome place to go when it’s dark outside early.
So plenty to do, plus other things here and there as well. And hopes to get some more trees down in the back yard this coming weekend as well. It’s why I usually like the two weeks they’re gone since it lets me get a whole lot done without interruptions while still doing a ton of business work as well.