Scary Cabin

Valentines Day and a 3 day weekend for President’s day, what could me more romantic than spending it at the cabin raking leaves, painting and installing flooring? We did take a break to have a nice prime rib dinner at the local eatery so it wasn’t all work.

We’re now in a phase of the project where we’re doing a lot of detail work. It all needs to be done and it does provide the finishing touch that makes everything look right. But it feels like we spend a lot time for not a lot of accomplishments. It’s not a room changing event like texture or paint.

The weekend started with finishing up the bull-nose on the stairs. It was just cutting and gluing down 7 or 8 pieces, but now the stairs are done. And they look pretty good. Then we moved on to painting cases and installing baseboards. The living area baseboards have been stacked (creating a tripping hazard) for a few months now. We were waiting for the right time to work on them. Since we’re starting with 16ft. long boards it made the most sense to have the miter saw right outside the front door, but we want to be working in the rain (or cold). The weather was perfect so we moved the furniture out of the way, cut and installed the baseboards in the living area and the final piece in the kitchen. With the kitchen floor a bit higher than the living area floor (1/4” or so), the baseboard in the kitchen needed to be cut down to match. The living area and kitchen now look almost finished! All that’s left is a bit of caulking.

We started painting the door/window casing upstairs, but that then limits what else we can do up there since the casing is laying on the saw stand and we don’t want generate sawdust while the paint is drying. Well, with good weather outside… We built a couple of sawhorses from the old deck/ramp wood and moved the painting outside. This allowed work to progress up in the bedrooms. The front bedroom window inside casing was installed (and measured for blinds). A couple of pieces of door casing were installed. Most of the door casings will need to have the width trimmed down so that’s a job for the next visit. Laminate was installed for the kneewall floors in the front bedroom. We have the laminate and since a lot of the area behind the kneewalls will be used for storage, using the laminate there will make it easier to move stuff around and easier to keep clean. Plus, it looks way better. We worked on preping the back bedroom kneewall area by adding a bit more subfloor and cutting out the unused vent pipe.

Genny got the bathroom door painted and that’s back up so all the doors upstairs are ready for hardware. Speaking of the upstairs bath, we installed the niche.

And since it was so nice outside, we spent a few hours racking leaves/pine needles. The area around the cabin is clear and we’re creating a nice large pile that will need to be hauled off to the burn pile.