It has finally warmed up! Can I get a hallelujah?! And just like that, from lows in the -20s it is now, as we speak 44 degrees above zero outside! It’s so great it is almost crazy. Last weekend Joe and I were still fighting the cold and he and I worked together and modified the two dressers for our main bathroom vanity and the master bedroom vanity. If you’ve been here from the beginning you would know that this all started with a garage full of furniture that I attacked and refinished in the summer of 2013. These two dressers were once my mom’s dressers, the first two pieces of furniture she had ever purchased when she moved out of the house (this very house actually) when she was just nineteen years old. They were of no real value to her, not even sentimental, so I felt comfortable flagging them for vanities. They’re both big for vanities and the one in the picture we ended up cutting the feet off of. I am not a terribly tall person but I’ve never understood why everyone seems to think we need to have to bend totally over to wash our faces off at the end of the day. So, though we did cut the feet off of it, the main vanity in the picture is still 36 inches tall (at least!). It was not a hard job though it was tedious and I was quite delighted to see Joe take to the work and even seem to enjoy himself! Of course, this is the kind of thing I just love to do! I got the sink at our salvage depot for $13 and the faucet off of amazon.com for $14, after that it only cost me a few dollars to refinish it and viola! I think it looks like we spent a heck of a lot more for it!

From there with hot weather looming and the promise of all of our snow gone Joe and I knew we had to jump on the one last opportunity we would have to burn the last of proof of the incredible amount of demolition we put our old farm house through. Interestingly we had a very low snow year, despite the cold tempts and, when it came to opportunities to burn, we just didn’t get many. Over the last few weeks, with finally enough snow on the ground, Joe and I were poised one weekend after another waiting for the weather to be right. All we really needed was a still day or night but the damned wind just blew and blew and blew. So, Joe decided it would be a night burn so he hurried home after work on Friday and lit it up. And oh my, did it burn and burn and burn.

I’ve burned many piles in my life, and so has Joe, but there was something surreal about this one that I never quite understood. It might have been in the size of it and how it was more spread out then we would have liked. In a perfect world we would have had a bob cat hanging out with us to hop in and push the pile together as it burned down but, oh well. We created one creepy and surreal landscape that we tended for most of the night. With that done, there was no reason for spring not to arrive immediately and it actually did! I had already taken Monday off of work on the hope that I would have something to do in the house all day. Hello sheet rock mud, hello knife and pan, hello taping and mudding, woopeeee!!!

After five hours I used up all 4.5 gallons of mud :/ But I had the entire second floor done and my hands were ready for me to quit for the day. Hello strangely heart-shaped blister, you hurt but you were so worth it! According to my estimates the rest of the main floor will be another ten hours to finish the first coat and another fifteen or so for the whole second and first floor finish coats. The worst is the first coat because, after that, I’m not doing any more work in the closets, they get one coat and that’s that! So, maybe another twenty five to thirty hours before we’re priming! Hallelujah! (no I’m not counting for the basement anymore, we’re gonna finish the main floor and get moved in before we start sheet rocking down there) Besides that Joe and I picked up sheet rock on Sunday so we have enough to damned near finish the whole house! It is amazing how much better everything gets when it warms up!