Scary Cabin

With another long weekend, we decided to forgo our normal new year’s festivities (asleep by 11pm and maybe wake up for the fireworks/gunshots) and spend New Year’s Eve at the cabin. It was nice and quiet there.

Not a lot was accomplished in our 2 1/2 days there, but we did catch up on some sleep.

The drywall work from last weekend was dry and ready for texture so that was first on the list. I used a hand operated texture splatter device instead of breaking out the full sized texture gun. The advantage with the hand operated one is that it only covers a small section at a time so much less masking is needed as the texture isn’t flying all over the place. The disadvantage is that it is hand operated so my arm got a good work out. The results were acceptable. I’d definitely use it again for small texture jobs. After the texture mostly dried, we primed and painted.

The stairwell needed a couple of remaining trim pieces to fully box in around the landing. Those were cut, fitted, painted, installed, and touched up with filler. So a lot of time was spent waiting for paint to dry and filler to dry. The stairway trim looks pretty good now. Almost like I knew what I was doing. With the trim in place, we started work on the laminate for the stairs. The first few a probably the most work since there are a couple of unique cuts that are needed to get them to fit. But in general the process goes something like this:

1) Cut a couple pieces to rough length.
2) Measure the width needed and then rip them to get that width.
3) Get the angle for the left side, mark it, set the saw to that angle and cut the left side.
4) Measure the inside stair width, mark that on the boards.
5) Get the angle for the right side, mark it, set the saw to that angle and cut the right side.
6) If it fits good, glue the two boards together and move to the next.

This is for each riser and each tread. The miter saw is upstairs and the table saw is in the back room, so this process involves going up and down the stairs multiple times. I think the first stair (riser and tread) took over an hour to get right. None of the pieces cut so far have been attached to the stairs because it seems like a good use for a pin nailer and my pin nailer was not at the cabin. Now that I know the process, I think I’ll need to do batches at each step to avoid turning this job into a stairmaster routine.

The upstairs bath got some attention. The sink is almost fully functional. It can be used as long as you don’t fill up the sink and let it drain. After shifting the vanity and sink left by about 6 or 7 inches, the drain line needs some re-arrangement to line up. We brought up a bunch of different p-trap/drain parts and although close, they didn’t bring things into alignment. A trip to the hardware store for a plastic flexible drain tube helps, but it doesn’t seal well enough to the sink and if the water backs up from the trap high enough, it leaks out. The right solution probably involves moving the drain and water lines over in the wall, but at this point, we don’t really want to do that. So maybe more bits of pipe will allow for better alignment? We also installed the door so that there’s a bit of privacy now. The door was a pain in the you-know-what to install. We probably should of expanded the bathroom a bit more, but we were trying to converse space in the bedroom so left just enough room for the vanity and a door opening. Well, the door opening and the door frame were so close that the frame fit but didn’t allow for enough adjustment to get the door to close. We had to hack about 1/4 inch one side of the frame with a saw to gain enough clearance. I think it took a good 3 hours to get that door hung. Just to make everything a bit more functional, we installed the toilet paper holder and hand towel ring.

We installed the back bedroom inside window casings. They were ready to go after being painted last weekend. We had hoped to do the front bedroom window too, but there was a slight miscalculation. All the windows in the cabin are 4 ft. tall. Well all the windows except the one in front bedroom, that one is 5 ft. tall so the 4 ft. pieces didn’t fit so well. We did install the front bedroom window sill, as that was ready.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that there was still snow, almost as much as when we left last weekend. However, by the time we left, a lot had melted. Hopefully there will be more as it looks quite beautiful when everything is covered.