Bat House/Grateful Dead House

Man you know your life is content when you start asking for things to be done for your Birthday rather than wanting "things". Tom asked me what I wanted for my Birthday this year & I told him I really wanted my Bat house & Grateful Dead house hung. They had to be taken down when we moved & couldn't be installed in the trees until the house was built. But it's time. So between him & Mandy (& who do you think got the ladder detail?) the Bat house was hauled & installed. The naturist in me is hoping for hot weather to heat up their attic & get them to move in ( the one we just had was too soon), the menopausal woman in me is screaming at the naturist. Must have something to do with me being a Gemini.
You definitely want to click on this set of pics for a blow-up! That girl was up there easily 25 feet! Don't look Colleen! Then there's the Grateful Dead house.....my brother Anthony went to a Grateful Dead concert back in June 1995 & bought this birdhouse for me, probably from a street vendor. Pretty funky,and definitely one of a kind........& home to many a bird family over the years!
So Mandy hung that for Tom (I mean me) for my Birthday.

First Mow

Guess it needed it......what a beautiful color!

Cross Draft

I have to tell you in all honesty, this saved Tom's butt & he didn't even know it! Tom & Mandy installed the storm door on the front of the house. As with everything they had a couple of glitches...nothing is straight or square even with a new house. But they got the door installed & OOPS, Mandy closed it before the door handle was installed. They had to drill a hole to pull the door open. Handle is now on...door works great, in fact you can see a mirror reflection of the front yard & it looks like the grass needs a mow! But back to Tom's butt or the saving of it...the installation of the storm door with the drop down screen, not only allows us to now have the morning sun shining in, but with that screen down & the sliding glass door open in the kitchen there's an awesome cross draft(since there's no A/C)! Fresh breezes for the witchy lady!

Tom's In Really Big Trouble!

We are having a heat wave....record high temperatures......92, 90, 88,95,89.......you get the picture. Last fall one of the two air conditioning units was installed on the roof, when the HVAC man came, he couldn't hook it up because it wasn't quite level. "It will be taken care of" I was told. Now it's June 10th & we've had a brutal heat wave. Normal temps are in the mid 70's. We have a small a/c unit in our bedroom we bought last summer since we knew the a/c would take a while to hook up, & Tom knew I'd need at least somewhere to go if I needed to chill out. "No the house air conditioner is not hooked up, but Thank you for asking". In fact it hasn't even been leveled yet. A premenopausal/menopausal woman does not do well in the heat. They have a tendency to be a tad witchy. They seem to harp on the same little things over & over...for example...when will the A/C be hooked up? Tom has purchased a 2nd room air conditioner for the room we are using as the family room right now. He finally got the guys over to level the unit (9 months later, but who's counting?) they have to get up on the roof & it's only 89 today, it's going to be worse up there. Then it starts to sprinkle & they tell me if it rains much harder they have to get down or they'll be sliding right off the stainless steel platform the unit is setting on. Cripes-what are the odds????
Well the rain held off long enough to level the unit, now we wait for Tom to call the HVAC guy back. I'll keep you posted.......

Window Washing

We've had some issues with the windows, not quite sure exactly what the problem is but I noticed after washing a few that there seemed to be spots on the film installed in between the panes to help cut down on the suns rays coming into the house. The company's customer service is excellent, (as we can attest to after all the issues with the peak windows in the family room) but before we called them, my mission now was to wash every window in the house; then make notes of those with issues and we can deal with them all at once.
Makes sense......but ladder climbing isn't one of my favorite things to do, in fact it's not even in the top 500! But I shall persevere! I stuffed everything into my window washing bag, there was no way I was going to be able to carry my window washing bucket, supplies & hold onto the ladder! My window washing bag is a Peppermint Patty lunch bag; into which my already wet rags went, along with my squeegee, a razor for scraping bug poop, my trusty note pad with pen & my washable red marker to circle all the flaws with. If you come over before the customer service guys you'll see some of our windows look like they have a case of the hives! Tom did volunteer Mandy to do it ( without her knowledge), then Mandy graciously offered on her own, & as much as I would have loved to take her up on the offer, I won't have a Mandy forever right?
So up I climb....about 14ft then have to stretch to reach the tops, poor Tom has to hold the ladder (well hey, who do you think was taking the pictures?) at least until I develop a comfort level with climbing this thing, then move it for me each time.
I'm sure eventually (in about 10 yrs) we'll have it down pat.
So with most of the windows washed (just over 70 so far), now is the time to clean all the screens. Makes sense right, then we can put them on the clean windows? These would be the screens that have been in the attic & are covered with sawdust, drywall dust & just plain old dust. So I'm washing screens, all 41 of them! What the &*#$ were we thinking??? At least the view out every window is beautiful!
And if you have a helper like Eva washing the outside of the windows too, it makes the job a little more enjoyable...............
Now here is one proud window washer....

The Corner Stone is In!

Tom & Mandy have decided they are ready to start stoning the side & front of the house. What will surely be a time consuming & dirty process started with the placement of the corner stone! All along the way Mandy made sure the stones were straight & level............

They were rockin'! I can't believe how much they got up on the first day!

And the second day!
Tom is holding up what will be the cap stone we'll use to finish the wall off.
By day 3 they were rounding the corner &
starting the front of the house!

1 Week later....................

We have the beginnings of a beautiful new lawn!

We also have an abundant crop of Maple tree helicopters!
They are sprouting everywhere!

Front Lawn is going in !!!!!

Finally! Well it's a couple of weeks later than the original plan (so what else is new when I keep changing the plans??), but the yard has been seeded & fertilized & rolled.

Now to give it a good start, Tom is using these teal blue mulch pellets to cover the seed with. They have seed starter in them & when the yard gets watered the pellets expand. In theory, they will protect the seed from washing away in a heavy rain, keep the soil moister longer & provide the seed with starter fertilizer to help it take root & grow.....we'll see how it works! It certainly makes the yard look like it's already covered with Kentucky blue grass.

These Eastern Tiger Swallowtails certainly seem to like it
after it's expanded some!

The Ledge is done!

There are some projects that just are not priorities with Tom & Mandy, but drive me nuts 'cause they're not finished. Like the ledge in the foyer, not a big deal from the downstairs view, but every time I come down the stairs it just looks, well....unfinished. (how's that for polite?) So now that the foyer wall has been repaired, we can get the ledge done! Mandy looks like she's just standing on the floor, but actually she's on scaffolding 10 ft up. We finally decided to cover the ledge with tiles to match the foyer floor & the landing on the stairs. Tom's the gopher on this project, hauling whatever she needs up & down the ladder as Mandy lays the tiles......but between the two of them they did a great job & it looks beautiful!.

No Indoor Mural

One & a half years after the water damage in the foyer, we finally sent Mandy up on the extension ladder to make the repairs. Apparently my idea of turning the water ripples into an indoor mural had been vetoed. (see post 02/23/07) I really do believe she was having way too much fun! She was just ripping right thru the paint bubbles & watching the stuff just hit the floor! Of course she's the repair part of the team-I'm just clean-up.

Nice patch job!

Beautiful finish work!

Finish work in the Loft

Tom is back inside for awhile with Mandy, working on the finish trim for the loft. (I know the idea of using the word finish in relationship to anything in this house is alien but really it's true!)They have cut, stained & installed all the oak thresholds. They look fabulous!In February when they installed the luann for the sub floor in the Loft, it was because the plywood floor had gotten wet (more than once during the building & framing stage of the house) & by now had quite a few layers of dirt & debris on it. You couldn't get it clean to lay the hardwood, so they had to install the sub floor. This created a step up from where the actual oak was installed for the railings. The white line in this picture is the hardwood floor which sits up 3/8ths of an inch above the oak. Now how the heck do you trim that??? Not to mention make it look good? (Which, needless to say had been one of my big anal concerns for quite awhile now, but I try not to say too much......) Oh yee of little faith......Tom bought the oak trim, Mandy stained it & with the router bit, they custom cut trim with a lip to fit over the raised edge. It's a damn fine custom job & looks terrific! (The close up shots aren't bad either.)

Slight Lawn Delay.......

The original plan was to seed our lawn Mother's Day weekend, but we went to my Mom's with my brothers & tackled Mom's landscaping instead. The delay gave me time to come up with another idea, it gave Tom another backache. I decided an island would look great up near the front of the road, I had always wanted one next door & we just never got around to it, now was the perfect opportunity, right? So the area was outlined, landscape bricks laid out in the shape of a kidney, soil brought in & Tom got right to work! We then brought home our beautiful Japanese dwarf maple that the neighbors had been foster parents to for the last 3 years. We transplanted it to our new island & it has center stage! Really.....grass will be coming soon.....

Beginnings of a Front Yard!

Well if you look at the top two pictures, it looks like we actually have grass.....but alas, it's only a spring collection of weeds. All being rototilled into the ground to eventually be destroyed with weed & feed. Even the bottom two look great, a level yard of beautiful top soil is a sight to behold when you're looking at your 3rd summer with no front yard!
We'll be planting grass this weekend!

Front & Side gardens

The flowers (at least I hope they're flowers) are coming up. Remember all those plants I whined about trying to plant in the stone & protect with little yougart containers ( see blog dated Sept 20,2007 "The Yard")? Well most of the plants made it thru the winter, they're supported with their little yougart cup collars (or plastic beer cups when I didn't eat enough yougart) & damn don't they look funny! We're going to have to come up with a permanent solution to hold the stone back so the plants aren't crushed each spring, but we've got time. So the soaker hoses were laid, now we need the landscape lighting & the sidewalk stone. The stone I had selected last fall was, of course, the perfect color to go with the rest of my color scheme. When the timing of laying the stone didn't quite fit in with our plans during the fall schedule, I was going to have to wait for spring.
Long story short.......(really no such thing here), by spring the store had gone out of business and the stone was no longer available!! Nor could I find it elsewhere! I was going to have to "settle". We were going to have to compromise & end up having the same stone as the neighbor's ( which was our old house-so of course it looks damn good-but I wanted different!) It would just be a reverse, purple stone for the beds & yellow for the walkway. Thank heavens the neighbors didn't mind us copying!

Shade Garden

We finally decided on the walkway that will bring you along the garage side of the house to the back deck (well, part of it, the stretch from the garage to our bedroom slider is still just pea gravel). The area between the river deck & our bed room slider had to be built up a bit & quite a large amount of fill was brought in. A retaining wall needed to be constructed & it's right up to the neighbors garage wall. (Neighbors as in: dog that bites Tom, NOT the nice neighbors who feed me & Tom.) We decided a small patio off our bedroom & a wooden walkway that would meander thru the shade garden would be just the thing.

So I'm on a roll, I'm planning the layout of plants & researching shade loving plants, actually found quite a few that flower, I'm ready for another garden! (Maybe....even another pond...shhhh-don't tell Tom yet.) Tom tells me we need to trim a couple of limbs from the tree that are too close to the house. O.K. Then the tree trimmers come.......man is that guy up there!! (When you click on the pic you'll see what I mean.) Look at those power tools! Umm-more than a couple of branches...we have a large pile of branches...we no longer have a shade garden, more like part sun, part shade. "But look at the expanded variety you have now for plants", says my husband. So much for all the planning & research. Back to square one.

Family Room Fireplace

Tom & I have been trying to come up with just the right design for the fireplace surround in the family room. It will be a wood burning fireplace & due to the massive height of the wall, it has to be substantial.

disregard the junk in front of the fireplace & envision......

We've been bouncing ideas around for a year. We've taken books out of the library, we've looked at ones already built, bounced ideas off anyone that would listen. Mandy got the brunt of the idea bouncing....what if...what do you think... if we did this...you get the general idea. So when we finally came up with a plan, showed Mandy pictures of what we thought we might want, she said.....what if...what do you think... if we did this...she did a quick sketch & we said "THAT'S IT"!

sorry, when you click on this one to blow it up, it's a little blurry
(hey, what do you want from a pencil sketch on a legal pad?)

Then Tom & I went shopping.....we had been talking stone around the fire place for awhile, but not like the stone they put up outside, I needed to look at different stone. I knew what I wanted & could tell you when I saw it. I saw it & it was special order 4-6 week lead time (of course), it was pricey ( hey, I have good taste) & once I made up my mind nothing else was quite the same.( Oh Yeah-Spoiled!)
Mandy & Tom finalized the layout (with my input). They calculated sq footage & Tom ordered the stone. Don't know when it will be constructed, but it will happen in our lifetime & it will be awesome! Check out the view from the Loft thru the railings!

Eva's First "Time-Out"

I am getting to experience the terrible two's first hand. Eva decided that I wasn't jumping to her bidding quite fast enough & threw her lunch plate full of food on the floor! So I helped her down out of her booster seat & sat her on the floor to pick up her food. Then I told her she was going to "Time-Out" because we don't throw food on the floor at Aunt Martha's.
She was crying, then pissy, then screaming 'cause "you scared me!". Well "Time-Out" is fine & dandy if you have a "Time-Out" out place-OOPS. House under construction, no room totally finished, certainly no place you're going to leave a 2 1/2 yo alone. So I picked her up, popped her back in the booster seat, strapped her in & carried her in the chair to the dining room, it's not used during the day anyway. Well what the heck....it worked!
Hey Gramma Colleen-start thinking about a time out spot.....we still have half a year to go!

The Loft Floor

Remember back the end of February, when they poured the self leveler on the loft floor & then they installed the sub floor; then we had that leak ???? Well about the beginning of April, when they were finally ready to continue installing the hardwood, they found a hump, so a section of the the sub floor had to be cut out, the floor underneath sanded & the sub floor section reinstalled.
OK we're finally ready to start laying the hardwood! They started in the room off the loft and continued thru to the loft. Eva & I got the floor in the room off the loft all cleaned up & isn't it beautiful??
The glue that is used to attach the hardwood to the floor is nasty stuff. Think sticky glue traps for mice, only on a much larger scale. The glue is "plopped" (no other way to describe it) onto the floor & then spread with a trowel. Tom & Mandy have this part down pat.
They lay the floor & then I come along..."the seam inspector"....well at one point on the installation of the floor, we waited a little too long to make sure the seams were tight. The glue was already setting up. We know how anal I am & Tom & Mandy did their damnedest to attempt to get those seams to butt. They pulled up part of the floor, they slid a long stick under the existing floor (well actually 3 of them) to try & align the seams.The sticks got stuck, one of them broke off under the floor! What an absolute disaster! There was this nasty glue everywhere. On the tools, on Tom & Mandy (but mostly Mandy), they'd get it on their shoes & track it on the finished floor. They'd try & pick something up & because the glue was now so tacky you couldn't get it off your gloved hand! Mandy's jeans went right into the garbage at the end of that day! Man, what a mess! They did their damnedest to make me happy. I'm sure at one point they both wanted to take one of the floor boards with glue on it that they had to pull up & just hit me upside the head with it! But they just kept on smiling.
Not to mention that I, as the detail person does the clean-up of any glue that seeps up between the seams, well, I certainly had my work cut out for me now. When they finally knocked off at 6:30, I now had to spend the evening on my knees cleaning up all that stray glue. See if I open my mouth at all about the seams when they lay the Dining room floor....

One Of The Reasons We Put Up with it All

The Cape Cod Bath

This is the upstairs guest bath. It started because the tiles I chose for the shower looked so much like the ocean. We had so much fun with this theme that we carried it throughout the guest bedroom too! (See Oct 28,2007 post "The guest suite is ready")
My cousin Heather lives in Cape Cod & has been a generous donor to the cause! It's a bright, fun, relaxing atmosphere of ocean blues & greens, seashells & starfish.

The Wizard Of Oz Bath

This is the half bath off the family room. I found this neat wooden sign in a catalog that said "Nobody gets into see the Wizard, Not Nobody, Not No How" & thought it would look great on the bathrooom door. When I found the metal sign of the Witch & Dorothy, the decision was made & Wicked Witch green will be the color! We got the green paint for the walls (and I mean green!) & Mandy painted the wooden sign for the door.
She did an awesome job faux finishing, she even used some metallic copper paint to tie in with the antique copper fixtures. I was a little hesitant a first, but it looks great! (really, what was I thinking??) In fact it looks so good, it's Mandy's favorite paint job in the whole house! When Tom & I were in Calif, my Aunt & Uncle's neighbors had a dog who played in the local repertory theater production of "The Wizard of Oz". So of course, pictures of Tuffy a/k/a Toto had to come home with us to be hung in the Oz bath!

The Mickey Mouse Bath

This is the half bath off the loft. We ended up using the leftover tiles from the pantry on the floor here. They are white & have black flecks in them so we used black grout. What decorations go with a black & white floor?
Mickey Mouse! Well, as with the others, we got Mickey stuff in abundance. Our neighbor Bob had to go to Disneyland In Calif. & brought us back a lifetime supply (just joking Bob) of soap, shampoo & hand cream! Along with a little sign that says "All neat & tidy". Our sister-in-law Nancy brought this awesome collage statue from Disney World of Walt & various "Mickey's" from different eras. Mandy painted the frame of the mirror to mimic the film strip border. We found great doorknobs for the cabinets. Our sister-in-law Cheryl's Mom gave us the soap dispenser & a tissue box straight from "Mickey Land" itself! They matched the border perfectly! The soap dispenser was put to use right away & as soon as we use up the "Mickey" box of tissues, so will the tissue box.
Tom's donation was the rug....
not exactly a saying learned from "The Mickey Mouse" club!

The Ladybug Bath

This is the 1/2 bath off the den which also opens to the outside for the hot tub. This was the second bath finished & was used primarily for the workmen since they could access it from outside. Just before it was finished I was in there & saw a ladybug. That was my Dad's nickname for me-so obviously he was keeping an eye on this project! From that point on the Ladybug bath took on a life of it's own! In fact, I have received so many cute Ladybug things that they are now going to overflow into what will now be the Ladybug garden!
But when it's time for that I'll be set, since my friend Marilyn gave me a pair of Ladybug rubber shoes for the garden!

The Bathrooms (The Cat Bath)

Oh the grief we've taken for all the bathrooms in the house! Each bedroom has it's own full bath, there is a 1/2 bath in the Den that also opens to the outside for the hot tub. There is a 1/2 bath off the family room & one off the loft.
Just what exactly do you do with 6 bathrooms???? Well, you give them a theme of course & you have a lot of fun.

The Cat Bathroom
This was the first bath finished in the house after we moved in and what was then our temporary bedroom. It is now the downstairs guest room & bath. It didn't have a theme until we moved into our room & could finish the guest room. We had this great picture of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland with his "Where you want to go" poem & thought it would be great in the guest bath. More importantly, since our sister-in-law Cheryl didn't like cats (& that's being kind) and since this would be the only guest room for quite awhile; we thought doing the room in cats would be quite funny. Since she was allergic, MJ always went right to her of course. We used to tell MJ that Aunt Cruella DeVille was coming & going to skin him to use for a fur throw. So the cat bath was done just for Cheryl, just our way of making her feel at home!

Kiddie Closet

The small space under the stairs will be the kids toy closet & hidey-hole.
Tom & Mandy cut a door down to size & stained it to match the rest of our doors.
Leftover carpet from another house was cut & installed by Mandy (the carpet layer) & a light fixture is in. We moved the boxes of toys down from the attic, ready to unpack. Now if Uncle Tom & Mandy would quit playing in there; Elise, Griffin & Eva might be able to use it!

Water, Water Everywhere !!!

It's Friday & Mandy's off so we get to leisurely read the paper & drink our coffee...WRONG!
You know how I said in the last post we were moving forward???? Maybe, but we're also taking two steps back!
What a rude awakening.....there's a puddle on the hall floor & as our eyes travel up there's a large bubble in the paint on the wall! There is a water ring around the ceiling light (and no I didn't turn the light switch on, you don't have to tell me twice)no biggie-Tom was just going to go watch his financial news & drink his coffee. HELLO!!! I got a dishpan, a towel & a razor, slit the bubble to let it drain. What the Heck!?! Well-follow the water right? Tom checks upstairs (yep-his coffee's getting cold) & the leak is in the furnace room, there's water on the floor & it's spraying out of these 2 valve things. Now, obviously it's not supposed to be doing that...so we need to determine the problem here. This is where I go watch the news & drink my coffee, hey, we all have our specialties-mine is clean-up, not furnace troubleshooting! Tom puts his thinking cap on & I take off for a bit....you know...things to do, places to go, people to see...etc.

I get home & there is a raised dry wall seam on the wall out side the office. Tom??? What's this from? Neither one of remember seeing it before. I look down to the floor & damned if there isn't another puddle of water! Where the heck is this leak coming from? We're inside looking, we're outside looking & can't find a thing.

You can see where the ceiling in the hall is wet, so Tom cuts out part of the ceiling & here comes the water...and keeps coming ...I had to put a trash can under it to catch it! Well we may have found the water, but determining the actual source of the leak is not going to be easy. Underneath the radiant heat pipe is a layer of insulation that looks & feels like aluminum foil. Tom's thinking they somehow must have pierced a heat pipe with a staple when they were laying the sub floor in the loft. Can't figure out how, he calculated the thickness of the plywood & the luann & even gave himself a 1/2" of wiggle room just to be on the safe side. The leak could be anywhere and running along the insulation until it finds a low spot. So where do you start looking? If it's in the kitchen, it's a smooth ceiling & we'd have to redo the whole thing, at least in the hall the ceiling is textured. Well, long story short (OOPS-too late for that) there was a rogue strip of 1" staples that got inserted into the staple gun.Tom gets up to the hole he cut, feeling around & looking with a flash light...what's are the odds that the section of ceiling he cut out is the area the tubing was pierced??? Excellent!!! You could actually see the water spurting out of the pipe & the staple that came thru the floor.Talk about a silver lining (no pun intended), only one puncture despite all the staples that were used & in an area where the ceiling could easily be repaired! I got the job of "the little dutch boy with his finger in the dyke", Tom got the parts to patch the hole & Mandy (when she comes back) will get to patch the ceiling. Leak repaired with minimal damage!

Oh...and the leak in the furnace room... well that was from 2 air purge caps that were missing their valve covers. The constant water leak in the radiant heat pipe caused the system to keep trying to build the pressure back up. The pressure couldn't build back up because 2 of the 5 caps were missing (just forgot to get put back on by the guy who worked on the system & it wasn't my guy!). The water just kept spewing out & soaking the floor of the furnace room. Once the leak was repaired & new caps put on we were fine! Just Fine!

Now it's Saturday & remember my job is clean up? Well I'm still cleaning up water & wet drywall (hmmn-wet drywall??? sounds like an oxymoron), mopping the floor in the foyer, I go to move the rug by the front door & find it's soaking wet underneath! The sealer on the tile floor has turned a milky white color! Will this never end??? Don't know if it's from the furnace leak & followed the baseboard 'til it reached the carpet, or from last winter's ice damming (which hasn't been repaired yet) & happened again. Tom & I have a difference of opinion on that....we'll probably never know. Even though that sealer did look pretty bad at first it did dry up clear!

The Loft

I got my blue wall!!! Mandy has painted one wall in the loft this beautiful blue. A choice Tom wasn't quite comfortable with at first (as he wasn't with most of the color choices), but it has grown on him.
Now it's time to start work on the loft floor.
Tom & Mandy are once again using that smelly self-leveler to correct some fluctuation's in the plywood floor. It's Thursday-my Eva day- so we're taking off & letting them stink up the house!
They'll install the luann over the plywood-glue, then staple it down. This will provide a firm base to install the hardwood on. We are moving forward!!!!

Mouse Holes????

So what's with the mouse holes you ask? We had a leak on the 2nd floor near the upper patio last fall. Tom & Mandy thought they had the leak fixed, we have since determined it's not. What was our 1st clue?? Maybe the water on the dining room floor? Tom had to cut a hole to determine the amount of moisture inside the wall. The "mouse hole" was cut low enough so that once the leak is fixed, the baseboard will cover the hole. Testing the amount of moisture in the wall required the purchase of a new tool (read "toy") known as a Moisture Test Meter. I'm not really sure who wanted to play, I mean work, with it more. There is definitely moisture in the wall as our meter tells us so!The kicker here is, there is a leak in the exact same place in the Family room & a "mouse hole" has now been cut into that wall too! Unfortunately there is water damage to the paint in that room. More ripples-more repair work! We'll have to wait for Spring to determine the source of the leaks & repair them; and as we all know...Spring in NY is nothing you can plan on! Therefore the floors in both the dining room & the family room can't be installed until the leaks are fixed. And yes...we continue to curse that contractor!

The Dining Room Progress Continues......

Our dining room had chalk marks all over the lower half of the walls..Tom actually let Mandy draw on on our walls - says "I needed a visual". The trim work on the lower half was drawn out in chalk so I could "see" what it would look like. They really want me to be happy with it before they start cutting all the wood. They also know once they start cutting, there had better be a damn good reason for all the sawdust in the winter.
The Crown molding is installed & stained! I love the antique finish, it brings out the detail!!

OK-so we have trim for walls, trim for the ceiling and .....
I'm So Excited...the ceiling light is hung!
Tom & Mandy repaired the old antique table runners so it opens easier..
we can now easily have dinner for 12!
Well, when the dining room is finished that is....

The recessed lighting has been installed behind the crown molding!

And all those chalk marks on the walls.....
and all the sawdust....
I'd say it was worth it!
It came out Beautiful!

And that little mouse hole in the corner.....
well that's a whole other story!

The Brat's Uncle

There was this big plan back in May of 2007, my brother Rick was at our Aunt & Uncles in Calif. Our Uncle was battling lung cancer & my brother, in the wisdom of all good Germans, knew the best treatment was good beer. So, after what can only be described as one of the best medical treatments in the history of mankind, a day of consuming large quantities of beer, micro brews, draft, bottled...didn't matter...the cure was in the yeast!!! (or maybe the devil was in the details..Unc got thrush-an oral yeast infection) Apparently sometime during this process is when they decided to plan a surprise 60 something Birthday for our Aunt. The phone call I received during this "treatment" became the planning stages of the party. The fact that I was able to deduce & therefore start to plan while these two were under "treatment", says a lot about my German heritage. Birthday is in October-plenty of time to plan.. My Tom kicks into gear-we'll need the 2nd guest room done.... & our project completion time lines now change. Hey, you do it for family.
Unc always called his wife a "Brat" (with much love, of course) and frequently told me I was a younger version. Hey, I had a Hell of a role model to take after!
Our Uncle passed away on August 27 after a long struggle with cancer. He was at home with our Aunt who loved him, at his side; but much too damn soon.
That same Aunt is still going to be 60 something. (Some things don't change huh Barb?!)
But the Birthday party is now a Memorial and it will be a little later in the year. So we brought the Californians to New York in November...What were we thinking!?!?
It was a Beautiful Tribute to a man much loved! A chance for all to reminisce & share in our loss.
The "California" contingent got in a little sight seeing on the East Coast-had a great trip to Cooperstown & froze their tushes off at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
Despite the freezing rain, gusting winds (which destroyed 2 umbrellas) and cold wet mist from the falls, we had a rainbow !

Barb & Dani look like they're "Singing in the Rain"
Who needs Gene Kelly??? We have John!