Scary Cabin

It was a rare 3 day weekend with President’s day falling on the Monday after Valentines day. So to celebrate, we spent the weekend at the cabin. We made dinner reservations at One Eye’d Jacks, the only local restaurant and had a nice prime rib dinner. This is what cabin life should be like!

However, it wasn’t all fancy dinners and roses. We did manage to get quite a bit accomplished. Genny’s folks came up too so between the 4 of us we were able to knock out a few projects.

Genny’s dad took on the back-breaking task of digging a hole for the new doggie septic system. We installed on last year, but it hasn’t worked very well and is now full (yeah, don’t try to picture that in your mind). The new one is larger and of a different design and, so far, it seems to be working better.

We continued to work on the downstairs bedroom. Genny finished painting the pocket door and we hung that up. We also installed the main bedroom door, but that’s as far as we got with it. It still needs to be painted and have the door hardware installed. If you look at the original state of the room, you’ll notice that it had wainscoting. Above the wainscoting the wall (and ceiling) were “textured”. I’m not sure what you’d call it, but looked like someone has splashed texture on as opposed to what you normally see today. However, it was the only room that wasn’t paneled. At first we tried a bit of sanding to see if we could smooth out the texture, but that wasn’t working. Whatever pain was over the texture made it nearly impossible to sand. We ended up doing a couple of skim coats of joint compound over it. Skim, sand, repeat. That made the walls and ceiling acceptable for some real texture. After sealing up the room, we sprayed it with the knock down texture. It’s now ready for paint.

The fireplace got some love while waiting for the joint compound to dry. We laid out all of the slate tiles in what we thought would be a good pattern. We then started attaching them to the front, working from the bottom up. One thing we didn’t account for was the large gap at the top of the metal surround. After aligning the tiles and getting ones that fit behind the surround we stuck them up there only to realize that the weight caused them to slide down into that gap. With some cardboard wedges and tightening up of the surround, we were able to get it to hold until the mastic set up. The tile work isn’t done, but even with just the front and part of one side, it really changes the look of the fireplace for the better. Genny made a great choice with that slate tile.

In addition, Larry and Barbara pulled down all the half round moldings between around the beams on the ceiling of the living area. It actually looks better with no molding at all so hopefully we can get that all cleaned up and not have to put any molding back up there.