Thursday, July 31, 2014

Phone home

Time to take care of some details.

We hang the shower curtain rod along with a shower curtain. Genny has had this curtain for many months just waiting for the day when it could be hung and admired. Well, July 5th was that day. This means that the bathroom is fully functioning.

We also finish the backsplash tile in the kitchen. The tile looks great, but would I use the adhesive mat instead of a mastic? Not sure. It is a lot less messy. We’ll see how it holds up over time.

Genny’s folks gave us their old cordless phone. In reality, it’s not that old and will be more than adaquate for the cabin. However, it needs power. Back when the cabin was built and phone jacks were installed, phones didn’t need power, they got all the power they needed from the phone line. With our new fancy cordless phone/answering machines, the phone line power just isn’t enough. What this all means is that we now need a power outlet near the phone jack in the kitchen. If we had though about this when that wall was open and electrical work was being done for the light switches, it would have been an easy addition. But now, with the kitchen done with nicely textured and painted walls, it’s a bit more difficult. Well, more difficult to install it and make the surrounding wall look good again. It’s not perfect, but it will have to do and we now have a nice cordless phone and answering machine. So we can now get all the messages from debt collectors trying to get a hold of the previous owner of the phone number. Yes, even though we’ve had the number for a year with no answering machine, we still get multiple messages a week.

The upstairs bathroom vanity was a bit worn (OK, worn and ugly). It was also leaking. The hot water line to the faucet split so we have no hot water up there. Now that we’ve started sleeping upstairs, it would be nice to have a working sink. We found a new vanity that fits our style and was reasonably priced at Lowes. So out with the old and in with the new. It really makes that half bath much more pleasant to use.

Needing to do some demo to keep in shape, we start ripping down the drywall in the downstairs bedroom. We know we’ll need to have this done before we can start working on the upstairs so it’s time. We only pull down the drywall on the outside wall and the wall shared with the utility room. These will get new insulation. The shared wall will also have the swinging door replaced with a pocket door eventually. But for now, we just make a mess. Since we were using this room as storage, we needed to clean up the utility room and move some stuff to the shed and get it cleared out.