The tile is for our vestibule area, which will serve as a kind of transition spot. There’s another large door (similar in size to our front door) that will enclose this area.
Before calling in a tile person to install it, she needed to lay out the pieces to make sure enough was sent over.
I had not one, but two extenders for my impact drill. I wasn’t sure how well this would fare, but it did the trick! If you’re surprised, well that makes two of us.
I guess it doesn’t have to look pretty, it just has to work.
Then I looked over, and noticed by wife. Who said to me “Mistakes were made.”
And around then is when I noticed how hazy the air was in the basement. And how everything seemed to have a slight layer of dust. Which ended up not being dust, but ash.
After the work of cutting everything, we tackled reorganizing our piles. We had smaller groups of trim for each window, but also had a lot of stuff that wasn’t going to be used in the near future. And needed to get put away (for a while, anyhow).
Back in the basement, suited up after a long day at work. We were able to make more progress on pairing boards together. And got some rough cuts in, for the windows.
With our newer cut list defined, Liz went about trying to match boards for each window (casings to match the stool/apron, etc). And after all this planning and talk, we finally set about making a few cuts, tonight.
There’s more to do yet, but actually cutting down some boards into rough lengths was a big deal for us. Trim is a newer endeavor, and tonight was a big, first step.
I’m a big fan of biscuits and gravy. And I’ve occasionally ordered chicken and waffles. But chick and biscuits and gravy? Where has this been all my life?
But what started as some research into how to cut returns for a window stool… ended up being an all-day conversation.
We spent a long while looking over trim videos online, trying to track down how to measure/estimate the length needed to cut a return for a window stool.
I walked downstairs this morning to see this: a whole mess of shellac flakes sitting on a coffee filter.
To get them off the tops of our sawhorses, we had to do this threading motion (feeding them in at an angle). A little challenging given that these were super-long boards, in a basement.
The storage we have against the wall is made of three sawhorses. Think about making a tight three-point turn in a car, and you’ll kind of get the gist of what we had to do.
Liz, looking over the window trim. We set up a set of horses, where we were able to stack and assess each piece.
Our first fire! It’s New Year’s Eve, and better late than never. Glad we got this in, in 2025.
I do have to say – this has been a long, long time coming. With the cost of fixing and updating a fireplace, we’ve held off on this for years because our money was better spent elsewhere – on more critical, infrastructure type work for the house.
To have this done and working is… difficult to describe. It’s a nice, warm feeling, both literally and emotionally.
Liz was a whirlwind around the house, today. Of the many things she was working on, she applied some mortar between the fireplace and our newly installed hearth.
We were fortunate to have Coast to Coast Masonry come back to our house, after the holidays… and to do a bit of adjustment work for us.
Liz, working in the living room, stuffing rope insulation between the flooring and drywall.
Detail view of the work. This stuff has a strong odor (it smells like a Pirate’s locker room), but does dissipate. Eventually.