Sunday Sunday Sunday

It's Sunday night... that means it's late and I'm putting off getting to sleep in order to do some updating. Before I do that though, let me just say that my two favorite characters on my other Sunday night activity the Sopranos and Entourage are Paulie and Johnny Drama.

So I've been going over to the house a good bit to work on stuff, and one of the biggest, but also least exciting tasks has been sanding and varnishing/polyurethaning the baseboards. My mom had always suggested we clearcoat/polyurethane the baseboards and trim etc rather than paint it like is normally done. Seemed fine to me, so I didn't think anything of it... untill we started, and I found out that doing that involves sanding, then painting on the polyurethane, then sanding, then more poly, then more sanding, then installing, then more poly and more sanding. It's quite the task, and if you don't put the polyurethane on just right it leaves funny marks on the wood. I'm getting better at it, but it was a struggle at first. (btw, don't ask me why it's called clear coating, varnishing, and polyurethaning.... but all three mean the same thing).

This is some of the baseboards on sawhorses during the sanding/coating process:

While over there today, I also picked up a bunch of the cardboard on the floor (to protect it) and swept a bunch of the saw dust up. I've been waiting to post good pictures of the floor until there's not much stuff on it and it's cleaned... but it's probably going to be a little bit before that happens, so I just went ahead and took this picture while it was the closest it's been in a little while:

The pattern turned out real nice. My only concern with it is it getting damaged because it's so soft. There were some small mess-ups with it from installation alone, and although there aren't that many workers going in and out of the upstairs, it's still taking wear and tear from all that's going on :/ I'm trying to leave lots of cardboard around to protect it, but I almost worry that because the cardboard's there, the workers think they can be more cavalier than they should be. I've found a few dents and scratches that definitely weren't there before.

The good news on that tip is that I started messing around with doing some patching of the cork. I cut out a little section on a scrap piece, then got some other cork, cut it up into pieces, jammed it in the section of missing cork, and coated it with polyurethane. Then I gently sanded it down flat, coated with more poly, etc etc. It didn't work perfectly, but it worked pretty well! With some practice (and I think maybe using a little glue initially), I should be able to patch it if bad things happen to it.

Another thing I've been working on, but withholding documenting quite yet are the kitchen cabinets. I drilled the handle holes, attached the handles and hung the doors this past week (after much thought and discussion into exactly how to position the handles) and this weekend I spent some time adjusting them so all the doors are spaced properly in relation to each other. The Ikea doors have three things that you can adjust to do this, and although they clearly show how to adjust each axis, it took a good bit of futsing about to figure out a good technique. The real problem is that if you change one thing, then you have to change 2 others on the same door, then if that changes how the door hangs in relation to the doors around it, you have to change all those. I'm doing a double stack of 24" tall cabinets too, so this makes the "surrounding doors" issue even worse. I finally got the hang of it today though and got a good bit done. Hopefuly I can get that finished up soon so I can take a proper photo n'at.

Alright, before I crash, here's a little video I took walking down the spiral stairs and into the patio. My mom brought over a little plastic table she got for free and some plastic chairs she got for a dollar, or something ridiculously as little. (Update: it seems as though the plastic table wasn't there when this was filmed... but don't worry, it's there now)