Happy Halloween!

Alas, fair readers, we have not had much to report as of late. After Thom's surgery things have been a bit slow and I'll admit it, I've been more than a little preoccupied by thoughts of a baby. No, not yet, but maybe sometime soon.

Anyway, in lieu of any new progress we are instead sending out our Halloween wishes. We present our first carved pumpkins in our new house. We're having a big bash on Saturday night too! I'll post a few good pics afterward too. Happy haunting!

A night in the emergency room

Thom woke up in the middle of the night with abdominal pains, which turned into nausea, which turned into worse abdominal pains. I was in the middle of weatherstripping and rushed him to the emergency room. Ten hours later I am now home. After myriad tests they found he had appendicitis and took him in for surgery at 9:30 - by 10:15 he was out. Very easy and all went swimmingly. He has three little band-aids - that's it.

He's spending the night in the hospital and I'm home to feed the cat and get a few hours of sleep before I re-join him in the morning (did I mention another nice thing about our house is that it's 3 blocks away from the hospital?). Send him your healing thoughts, friends. He feels so much better already!

And, bonus: the surgeon took some really cool photos of the appendix - pre- and post - maybe I'll post them :)

Autumn Day in Maine

While we did make some very un-sexy house purchases today (extra insulation for the attic and weather stripping) we spent the majority of the day out playing in our lovely state. A great deal of the day was spent finding our way through a corn maze, finding some pumpkins, and picking some apples. Although a chilly day it was a fun one. Here are a few photos of our day at Treworgy Orchards in Levant, Maine.

An aerial view of the corn maze - pretty cool, eh?

The chosen pumpkins

Thom blaming me for getting lost in the maze

Almost done!

I slept in this morning, which was quite lovely. I came downstairs and looked again at the kitchen (which held up to a very pleasant girls' night last night, I might add) and am still so happy with our new floor and the whole package altogether, really. I think the most satisfying thing was going back to our punch list and crossing off almost all of it! What's left now are the moldings, the baseboards and thresholds, the backsplash, and then we get to call a plumber and have our water line installed so we can have ice and water in our fridge finally.

We've come a long way. We learned a whole lot, swore a lot, and gotten a few cuts and bruises, but overall I think it's been totally worth it. Here are some before and afters once again.

Kitchen Floor - Part Deux

It's in! And it's gorgeous! I'm very happy with our new cork floor in the kitchen and, once again, have to give a big shout-out to Paul, who really did most of the hard work. You saw what we did last night (along with lovely Leslie's help!), which constituted a lot of the "hard" work. This morning, we started at 7am and put the underlayment down and then went ahead and got started.

Below is the first course, which was probably the toughest. It was a lot of making sure it went in right and the cuts, particularly around the heater pipes, were correct. Once that was in, it was pretty much smooth sailing. While the directions didn't suggest doing so, we did stagger the seams, which I think makes it look better and is much stronger.

I would definitely recommend this product (HD ordered - $2.99 sq ft) and this project to anyone. While we of course still will have to put the thresholds and baseboards back in as well as a bit of quarter-round here and there, it's pretty much done. Altogether, it took 3 hours to do the prep work, including removing thresholds and cutting out the door casings. And then about 3 and a half hours to do the actual floor (the kitchen is 13x14).

One tip I would have is to definitely buy the little kit you can find at HD for installing engineered floors. It came with a tapping block, the spacers, and a metal pull bar. It was about $20 and wasn't recommended in the directions but it made the whole thing a lot easier, in my opinion. Besides that, it was just a jigsaw and a circular saw to do the rest. Easy-peasey.

New kitchen floor - Part I

Paul and Leslie called around 6pm, wanting to know if I wanted to get started early on the floor in the kitchen. I said, of course, and we listened to the debate while we started prepping the kitchen. The first task was dislodging the four thresholds (basement, hallway, dining room, mudroom). Three came out relatively easily but the last one, leading to the mudroom, was a bit different. This required actually cutting off a piece of it as it was originally the threshold leading outside to the back porch. I don't know what we'll have to do with that but that will be at some point later.

Then it was removing baseboards and undercutting the door casings. I was happy to use my newly purhcased jamb saw - which is totally awesome, by the way - and then Paul came in with a chisel to get out the rest.

With moving the appliances, it took about 3 hours to do those few things. I'm going to get up at the butt-crack of dawn tomorrow to run to HD. I was told, by the HD people, to buy vapor barrier even though this is an above-grade installation. Paul recommends (as do the directions) to just use polyethylene underlayment so I will be getting some of dat instead. Paul will be here bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed at 7am. I hope we can nail out this puppy in a few hours - I'm trying not be overly optimistic though; as I should know by now, it never is as easy as it seems.

I'll show you what I can when it's done! Say goodbye, ugly, asbestos-laden vinyl!

Some miter nice work

I've been putting off the daunting task of reattaching the trim to the top of our cabinets. When we pulled down the soffits this summer there was a long expanse of trim over the window and when it came down, so did a bunch of the attached cabinet trim. What this meant was not only did it need to be put back up, but it needed to be recut and [insert music of impending doom here] mitered. 

I was honestly freaked out about doing this. Not only was my last dose of geometry in the 10th grade but, for some reason, cutting angles seemed scary to me. I sucked it up today and bought a $14 miter box from HD and decided to give it the old college try.

For my first attempt, I feel pretty good about it - especially without power tools. It's not perfect (the home improvement mantra in the Bangor Foursquare) but it's better than it was (the new addendum to the home improvement mantra). 

I've definitely got the home improvement bug back, that's for sure. I think I over-exhausted myself this summer but now with a month off I feel it pulling me back in - so much so that I think I'm going to put up the crown molding myself this weekend (Thom's going home to Seattle to visit) and we've got renewed vigor to do the floor next weekend when he's back. Huzzah!