Moving forward

Our stove burning merrily this morning

It’s a drizzly morning and the first weekday in several weeks that we haven’t had workmen here. It feels like a holiday! No getting up at 7 AM to make sure I’m dressed before the guys get here. The drywaller was especially early, arriving every day before 7:30. He finished up on Monday.

Last week I mentioned that our stove was done, but I didn’t put up a picture. Here it is. It works really well and makes our house toasty and comforting. Yes, that’s the choo choo train steamer on top.

Here’s what the deck looked like on Friday

The guys spent most of last week tearing down our deck. We have a huge deck that runs the length of the house and is at least 10 feet deep and deeper behind the garage. But when we bought the house, the deck felt a little crispy. It hadn’t had any treatment in years. My niece and sister tried to restore it by painting it while we were back in Texas, but they unfortunately used the wrong kind of paint, not oil-based as they should have. So, all it did was peel.

Our beautiful new deck, almost finished

Toward the end of the week, the guys added supports so that we have twice as many as shown in the picture above, so the new deck will be nice and sturdy.

This week, the guys started rebuilding the deck with TimberTech, some of that stuff that’s half plastic and half wood. We won’t have to do any maintenance on it from now on. Anyway, it is almost done, and it looks great. We have aluminum posts now, and they just have to get a couple of missing pieces and add the gate.

Today the guys are on another job. When they come back, they will finish up the deck and then start working on the staircase again. They have to install a railing and replace the flooring up top. Then I’ll have to go back to the carpet guys.

In a couple of weeks, the house painter arrives. That is going to be extremely disruptive. We are painting the whole upstairs and downstairs where the new drywall for the stairwell is installed. I spent a lot of time picking out my paints last week. Right now most of the interior of the house is white, but where there is color, the choices are peculiar, pinky red and violet in the kitchen and a light green in the entry hall and the wall just across from the violet. Then there are the blotches on the wall, caused by my efforts to touch up the paint before we rented the house out and the inability of the paint store to precisely match the color. They are all through the house on the white paint.

My kitchen will be butter yellow and amber, my bathrooms a pale greenish blue, and my bedroom a deeper greenish blue. My eight-year-old great niece has picked out a deep aquamarine for “her” bedroom, and my entry hall will be dark teal. The rest of the interior will be white.

We are also painting the exterior, but that will have to wait for a while until it stops raining. I’m not telling the colors for the exterior yet. They will be a surprise.