Nov 5 - Jason said it ...

Trim makes a huge difference. 

I started on that yesterday, painting the pieces of door casing and baseboard that I'd picked up and doing three of the doors in the kitchen.  The sliding door now has sides but no top -- I'll pick up the 12' piece this a.m. for that.  The other door that needs a long piece at the top is the dining room -- needs a 10' piece.  I caulked and re-coated the newly applied trim.  Looks great ! 

I decided to finish up the doors before tackling the baseboard.  Baseboard in the kitchen is really fiddly with most pieces needing tops cut off at the ends because they go under cabinets.  That's the trouble with 6" baseboard ... same thing that we ran into up north in the bathrooms.

The kitchen has four doors; the living room / dining room area has another five ... doors are us ! but doors go quickly.

Before the trim work, I finished hanging the two fans on the upstairs deck.  They too look great, so nice and new.  They make the paint look really tired ... I did get a quote from Duane on the paint but that's not happening this year, I think ... we'll see.  I wish that we could get some mud-wasp-repelling-paint.

Sam came over and checked out the stair treads.  He is going to be able to turn the bottom two very, very, very slightly so that they line up with the grout line on the floor.  The stairs have to be parallel to the side wall, naturally, and it's not square to the front outside wall.  The tiles are square to the outside wall, as they should be.   He's got the treads all planed down to 2" from their original 3".  He says that he has 12 huge bags of maple chips now !  I didn't try to pin him down as to installation date.  "A few days" was what he said.  They're working hard at this and I don't want to rush them.  They need to router out the bottom for the plate and then stain and clear coat the treads.  He knows that we're anxious to get this done.

I talked to Bill mid-day yesterday and went over my kitchen punch list, 14 items.  He appreciated the call, since that helps them get as much done as possible.  Even so, I expect that there will still be a few items that are outstanding after today; that's the way it goes.  He said that there will be two guys here most of the day.  My plan is to go biking, so I expect that the kitchen will look a whole lot different when I return !

I talked to the granite people as well -- Friday between 9 and 10 a.m. they said.  Wonderful !  Of course that means that my Friday will be taken up plumbing ... or we won't have a working kitchen ... there's something about having working sinks that's important in a kitchen :).

Our temporary island top made a great place for painting trim yesterday.  Will I be able to do the same thing on the real island top ?  Well, mostly, but the faucet will get in the way ...Perhaps I should just get all this painting done ?

We had our shrimp / sauteed spinach / rice dinner last night.  Sandy found shrimp at OceanS Seafood (yes, it does have a capital S there).  They were from the Gulf somewhere, so somewhat local.  They were good.

That's about it ... Onward !