Renovation - Floor down

Last Saturday, Lynne planned on taking the kids to the botanical gardens to meet up with friends.  I planned to stay home all day and lay the tile floor.  Laying the floor is a kind of a slow process as you have to lay some tile glue down, then wait for it to dry some and get tacky.  Then you lay down the tile in that area.  This gets repeated many times as you can't lay glue on too much of the floor or you would be tracking glue all over the new tile and anywhere else in the house you roam.  Well, on Saturday I managed to work through the room laying the tile and getting it all down.  In the end I am really happy with the floor.  Lynne was also pleased with the final product.  During the waiting time I managed to stain the end tables some more (more on those in another post later) and finish the cabling in the adjacent room.  Slowly we are moving towards finishing this room off.

Wordless Wednesday

Renovation - Prepping the floor.

I am trying to get better about the renovation posts and making them a little more timely.  Since last weekend the door is painted and rehung.  It is much nicer now - without the globs of excess paint it actually can close. I still need to put the door knob back on and put the new strike plate on the door jamb (the old one was no longer brass from all the coats of paint).  Then it will be done.

This week I also worked on leveling the floor for the new tile (this is the photo in the post).  The old floor consisted of carpet (that we ripped up) with tile underneath.  Many of the tiles near the walls were broken when they installed the tacking strips for the carpet, so we can not use that flooring.  So, we are going to be installing a new tile that looks like a fake hardwood floor.  Not the fanciest but the tile is very durable and considerably cheaper and easier to install than real hardwood.  In order to install this I needed to make the entire floor level.  So out came concrete that I used to fill in holes in the floor and where there was tiles missing.  If all goes well this weekend I am hoping to lay the new floor.  

What the hell Rockville?

I'm a planner. I like knowing what's going on and what the options are. It's December in the USA and I knew there would be Santa sightings. So I went looking for information about wheres and whens. Nothing.

I read in The Patch today that Santa hit Town Square YESTERDAY in an armored vehicle. Bet that would have been fun to see, eh? Then tonight during dinner we hear a fire truck sirens all a'blaring. It's coming closer. I guess a neighbor's house is on fire? But no, just as it rolls past our house we realize Santa's on the truck. We all rush to check it out.

Zoltan is the smallest and his chair is the farthest from the front door. He never even catches a glimpse. Thusly, he becomes completely hysterical, crying and wailing, because he missed it. If I had known Santa was coming, we had plenty of time from when we first heard the sirens to come out and see. But no, there was no way to prepare.

I finally had to tell Zoltan it wasn't our religion anyway so he should stop crying.

Sigh. Out of the mouths of babes

Tonight...
Alex: I don't have a phone to play games on.
Me: Right, so you have to play games in other ways.
Alex: You mean like tablets?
Me: NO, like on boards.
Alex: What are boards?

Later in the evening, talking about a new snowman stuffed animal
Zoltan: Mommy, I am sleeping with Frosty tonight
Me: Yeah, we like Frosty
Zoltan: Yeah, it is so yummy on cake

Wordless Wednesday

Renovation time

This Saturday Lynne took the kids to the Ballet with Auntie Heather and Harrison.  I decide to skip hunting one day and concentrate on getting something moving the in the study downstairs.

Last time I wrote anything the walls were spackled and needing paint.  Painting has since be completed (mostly by Lynne during nap time and on sadik days).  So now I have been working on the drop ceiling.  First I installed the drop ceiling grid, then a new light was installed within the grid.  The first photo shows the drop ceiling grid installed with the lights. 

Next I started installing the drop ceiling tiles.  I had to leave one area open to install the air ducts.  This required a trip to Home Depot for parts.  Once back I completed the duct work, terminating all the cables in the room, and installing the outlet covers.

With the duct work complete I finished installing the ceiling tiles.  Now the ceiling is done. I pulled the door to the room off its hinges so I could sand down all the old paint.  It is amazing that a contractor was paid to do a job this bad.  The guy painted over dirt and left paint drips everywhere.  With all that extra paint lots of doors in our house don't properly close.  I am slowly working on correcting that.  Last night I got the door sanded and started painting again.  So the list of work to is slowly dwindling.  We still have to finish painting the door and rehang it, touch up paint the walls where I made a mess putting up the drop ceiling.  After that I need to level the floor, then install the tile floor.  And lastly paint and install the trim work.  Lots to do but lots less.

Scranton

In the seven years since we bought the cabin, we have never spent more than a week a year there. 90% of our time there has been spent over the summer or nearby months. This means that we have thoroughly explored the library, the beach club, our property, and a couple of local playgrounds. We've hit the Wilkes-Barre mall and shopping centers. We haven't had the time or inclination to explore farther afield.

Enter: The D.C. Tour. This summer alone Alex and I got at least 2 full weeks here, maybe more. Terry and Zoltan got a bit less. We've taken two four-day weekends this fall/winter. And, we have now visited Scranton.

The first visit was just me and the kids. We visited the Everhart Museum, Scranton's own Science/Art/History museum. Yeah, you read that right. There was some event going on in the art gallery so we didn't get to check that out as our visit got cut short due to bad behavior, but we did get through the science (dinosaurs, rocks - many of which glowed under UV light) and the history (I can remember Egyptian and African art and a video of interviews and "traditional" dancing; "traditional" in quotation marks simply because I am not educated enough to make a judgment). The grounds are also lovely and back right into a park where we would have visited post-museum. Maybe next time.

The more recent trip was to the Steamtown train museum, not to be confused with the Trolley Museum located across the parking lot and the destination of our next Scranton trip. This time Terry and his dad accompanied us. I made sure we got there in time for the locomotive repair shop tour, which I thought would fascinate the kids until I remembered, mid-tour, that kids don't like tours. They were amazingly well behaved though and as there were some super-cool things to see and we did stay in motion a good bit of the time, it went well. The rest of the museum was also well done, and I am so glad we stumbled on the History section (you had to go back outside into the train yard, around 2 train cars and into another door) because there were the replica train cars we got to run around.

Our hope is that next time we'll have a whole day to devote to Scranton and get to Old Forge for pizza.

"Old" friends

Something I think every foreign service person would recognize: having in your life people who knew you when is important, but it is equally important to have people who knew you where.

Wordless Wednesday