What else have you been doing?

With the nice weather, we have done outside stuff, along with cat abuse.

Here billn climbs a tree (this limb is about 25' above the grass) to tie a rope and pulley to the tree. Remember what senior and junior daughters say "danger is fun sometimes." Read on to understand the rope and pulley.

Here is some bow sawing. Danger is fun and rewarding sometimes.

You can see senior enjoying the rope and pulley here. This is an old water ski tow rope. On top is the pulley. Billn pulls down on one end and connected daughter hangs on to go up. Very fun.

The children realized they can sit on the tow rope handle, as a swing. This is a great swing for their small bodies, the rope holds their sides and they hang on to the single vertical rope right in front of them. They can swing very high. In fact, tonight we measured senior after dinner, here eyes were about 11' above the grass at the peak. Danger is fun a lot of the time.

Not everybody is permitted to nap on the couch.

Wall cabinets up

So why haven't we blogged in a few weeks? The weather has been nice, so we have not focused on house construction. However, here are pictures of the wall cabinet installation.

Nice painting shirt and shorts.

Here are the first two wall cabinets to go up, after the ceiling paint was dry.

What a handsome carpenter we have on this job. NOT!

Before final tweaking. By the way, this is a microwave cabinet. Part of 70Hack is sad we even have this cabinet, we barely used it in our apartment and we do not have one now and have not had one since June 01, 2007. We will probably buy one, eventually.

Our furry purry time bomb decided to inspect the work.



Here is the other side of the kitchen, that's it, not many wall cabinets there. The range hood goes above the range, after we buy and install tile. We have a cabinet for above the refrigerator, but we might buy a different one. That is still undecided.

Here is a semi-finished kitchen. The dishwasher is not white, that is just the protective coating we have not removed yet. The DW is stainless.

More semi-finished kitchen.

Some visible progress

Here a family of raccoons completes the installation of the new faucet. This faucet was a replacement unit. Billn completed the installation of the first faucet and no cold water flowed. Billn wasted 2 hours of his time taking the faucet apart, only to discover some problem with the cold water fill pipe.

Here is a picture of the sink installed and the faucet. Here billn and assistant junior are installing the switch for the food waste disposal.

Here are foreign tools. These belong to the countertop installers. The installers were quite professional, even though they didn't vacuum up their mess and some of the pieces they added to the insides of the cabinets are crooked.

The laundry equipment finally moved into the laundry room last week. Here is an outdoor picture of the redneck cardboard system we had for water in, water out and dryer vent discharge. Go Vermont!

Here the raccoons and their pet cat (who looks like a lump of fur in this picture) roll the washer into the laundry room.

In other news, billn is nearly complete with the kitchen ceiling. This has to be painted so we can install the wall cabinets. Then our kitchen will become quite functional, needing only tile for the walls and floor. Billn continues to prove he is lousy at installing drywall compound. Four applications into the ceiling and a coat of ceiling prime, there are some obvious spots that need more.

Also, billn installed a bunch of little pieces of drywall that needed to be installed. Those time consuming tasks are done (although they only have one or two coats of drywall compound on them).

Finally, today billn, senior and junior went to the farmer's market. We always meet somebody we know, today we met senior's teachers from school. They leave tomorrow for New Hampshire to marry, then Ireland for honeymoon. We wish them the very best. Senior really connected with their teaching technique.

Tomorrow, grass cutting, ceiling compound and hopefully paint. Maybe some wall cabinet installation, maybe not. We are glad to have a functional dishwasher, sink and garbage disposal to accompany the refrigerator and range.

Special guest star, Shirlsd. During a recent business trip, billn met up with shirlsd for dinner (and photography).