The wife signed me up for a second watercolor class at Furman. My technique is getting a little better, but I’m still trying to add too much detail. The excess paint muddies the image and bleeds over the white space that makes watercolor so unique. Maybe I’m just not a watercolor painter. You might recognize a couple of these images from our recent trip through the mountains.
For my birthday, the wife enrolled me in a watercolor class at Furman University. It ended last night, so I thought I’d post some pictures of my paintings. This was my first stab at watercolors since the second grade and my technique was a little rusty. Some of the paintings are out of proportion and I wasn’t very good at letting the white show through. As you might expect, the gallery includes the obligatory Bob Ross landscapes and the clichéd fruit bowl.
I really let this project drag on. We’ve had a functional bathroom for weeks, but I haven’t really had a chance to finish the drywall and paint. We entertained guests a couple of weekends ago, which made me put off sanding the drywall mud. After they left, the wife broke the central vaccuum. She somehow sucked up a three foot long rubber band that she uses to work out. After disassembling it a few times, I eventually got it out. Last weekend, I finally got around to painting the beadboard and trim.
On our block, all of the addresses are painted on the curbs next to the driveway. They’re very faded and it’s almost impossible to discern the street number while you’re moving in your car. Who looks at the curb anyway? Even if someone down the block has noticeable numbers you could use as a benchmark, the randomness of the double-lots would throw you off every time. Whenever we’re having friends over or something is being delivered, we have to tell everyone to look for a green porch swing. I decided to finally make an address marker that would be impossible to miss.
I wanted it to be in the fashion of some of the wrought-iron plaques that some neighbors have, but I wanted to use some of the scrap pine that’s laying around my garage.
As apart of our Labor Day “staycation,” we cleaned the house. While my wife worked to organize her sewing supplies, I was cleaning the workshop in the garage and fixing a few things around the house. I’ve been looking for something to do with the wood that I have leftover from the kitchen remodel, so we came up with a short list of things to do:
It just doesn’t feel like a weekend unless I paint something white.
As you know from the last update, we encountered some unexpected grief from the kitchen sink. Once we got all of that sorted out, my wife and I were able to turn our focus back to finishing the room. We’ve been very busy with work and family lately, so we haven’t had more than a day or two where we could devote our attention to the house. I managed to get a little carpentry done after work, including building these 18″ deep shelves for the pantry:
The pantry space is over three feet deep. We figured there was no reason to install such deep shelves, as we wouldn’t be able to reach anything in the back. And we couldn’t treat it like a walk-in pantry with shallow shelves, because the space is only two feet wide. My wife balked at the idea of putting in a false backing, since we’d essentially be throwing away good storage space in an otherwise small room. She recommended that we put shelves in the back for things we seldom use (specialty appliances and seasonal china), and build a movable pantry to maximize the volume of the space. This solution is actually closer to her original design, except that the pantry moves on wheels instead of on expensive, heavy-duty slide rails.
We don’t have a lot to report. We’ve been hosting people in and out of the house a lot lately, and that trend will continue throughout the summer. After work last week, my wife and I found some time to cut and install the baseboards. Some of the cuts were difficult, especially where the cabinets meet the walls next to the stove. They still need a couple of coats of glossy white paint, but getting this trim work on the walls covered up the last traces of the old room:
Last week was very busy for us. As you know, the cabinet people came on Tuesday. We worked like crazy on Wednesday to finish the ceiling and the baseboards, but we didn’t manage to get enough paint on the wood on Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday morning, the new refrigerator and range hood were delivered:
It fits pretty well into the custom cabinet space. The delivery guys had to take the doors off the fridge to get it into the house, and the right door sags a little since they reinstalled it. I’ll raise it up when I have some spare time.
We’ve been really busy since last weekend. After work on Monday, we filled the gaps in the floor with a cream-colored grout. After almost two years with a black and white floor that advertised every speck of dirt, we wanted to go with something a little more low maintenance. I had never done this before, so I was a little intimidated. It wasn’t so much the work that worried me as the time sensitivity. Thanks to a few YouTube tutorials, we managed to do an okay job:
Getting the grout haze up is a pain, but it goes away quickly if you wipe it with a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water.
