Scattered Thoughts . . .

Tonight will be a little primer for St Paddy's Day. The corned beef is being slow-cooked in a dutch oven and the potatoes, carrots and cabbage are prepared and ready to be cooked. I plan to make some homemade Irish Soda Bread the next time I make this meal next week. In meantime, as the corned beef slow-cooks, the Guinness is cold and tasting smooth... and, it is being served in an antique can this evening... Seeing the fireplace in the background of this photo reminds me... When the guys were delivering and setting up the new furniture yesterday, they commented about how nice the fireplace looks and they asked if I do that sort of work for a living. I just chuckled and said it was more like one of my hobbies.

Overall, my health has been quite miserable and very unstable for the past few months.  What really pushed my health into this bad spell was the fireplace project during the few weeks in December. I was in a rush to get the fireplace to an operating condition before Christmas arrived. Systemic Mastocytosis causes extreme, overwhelming fatigue and this is especially so whenever I over do it and use more energy than my health allows. I'm still trying to recover from pushing myself to finish that project in time for Christmas...  but, the fireplace really is nice. Unfortunately, although "really nice", that fireplace is still not completely finished.  I managed to work on this project about an hour each day this past week.  It still wore me out each day... imagine just a quick hour of light, easy work requiring bedtime immediately... Despite the need for sleep everyday, over the course of the week I managed to fill some open edges, sand, fill some more, sand even more

As some of you have already seen in my Facebook posts, I managed to get the fireplace project finished just in time for Christmas.  Actually, I don't think it was finished until 4:30pm on Christmas Eve!  Then, after cleaning the house of all the construction debris and sawdust, we carefully carried an ice-covered Christmas tree into the house and decorated it.  Between wrapping presents, putting together toys for the grandchildren and decorating, I don't think we made it to bed until 1:30am on Christmas morning.   Since we started renovating the house about five years ago, we have seen various parts of the house in multiple stages of construction.  So the purpose of this post is to show some photos of the progression of the living room project over the course of a few years.  There is no doubt that the living room is a much more comfortable and 'warmer' room today than ever before. Of course we still have a lot to do... ceilings, floors, another wall which is shared

The last real progress made on the fireplace... concrete backer-board for the tile... Well, just about everything is on hold now.  My health has hit its limit with this living room/fireplace project and Christmas preparations. Compounding my problems is the fact that we are expected to have icy road conditions for the next few days which means there is little chance I will get up to Williston and South Burlington for more building supplies, presents, etc.  Of course, if I lack the energy for this it doesn't matter much. My health has crashed quickly this time.  I managed to have a fairly productive morning but then I seemed to hit a wall.  I didn't even have the energy to clean up anything at all.  I just laid down for a few hours and then figured I needed to jump back into working on cutting tile for the fireplace...  no luck. I couldn't even think straight. I needed to measure things multiple times... over and over again... I couldn't draw a straight line no

Taking shape... notice the new custom paneling in the background where this fireplace will reside... (don't mind the dirty floors... I have really been beating on them this week!) I had an exceptionally productive day yesterday as you can see from these photos.  Not only is the maple and aspen paneling stained and finished looking warm, inviting and beautiful, but I have a good chunk of the fireplace and shelving unit cut and assembled. The mantle will also be aspen to match the walls.  The plywood sides of the fireplace and shelving unit is cut from birch. Much of the rest of the fireplace will be douglas fir and pine. I hand selected all the wood but did have to make some substitutions from my original plans because I could not find what I desired. The finished product should still look beautiful albeit a bit more expensive. Between the price of my substitutions and the time wasted trying to find what I needed, collecting materials was a long, tedious and frustrating proces

Just like many others across the midwest and the east coast, we got a bit of snow this weekend.  We had originally planned to cut a Christmas tree today but we canceled our plans so we could stay off the roads. The single digit temperatures also factored into our decision to cancel our trek to a tree farm to cut a Christmas tree today. Staying home for the day allowed me to get some more work done on our fireplace project.  I spent some time staining our new maple and aspen paneling on the wall behind the fireplace. Then I managed to rip a bunch of 2x4's that I had sitting around from a previous renovation. I ripped the 2x4's down into 1.5"x1.5" which I intend to use for framing the fireplace structure.   After all that ripping, I cut out a test architectural brace for the fireplace. This original design had a compound curve in it that is difficult to cut at the thickness of this test piece. Turns out I didn't like this design. I decided on a simpler design

Laying out the tile and some dimensional lumber for the fireplace... A week or two ago I wrote about a new home renovation project... designing, building and installing a little fireplace. This fireplace will be a relatively simple gel-fuel fireplace which does not require any flue whatsoever. This project entails upgrading an entire wall of our living room so, as usual, this project is a bit more than my health would like to tackle... but I'm hoping to be successful with this project which entails getting it finished before Christmas. First, I started working on our primed steel front entry door.  It is a 15-lite door so calling it a 'steel' door can be misleading.  It is a nice door but isn't so nice looking with its factory gray primer.  I've been saying for a few years since I installed this door that I would like to finish it to appear as though it is stained wood.  Since this front entry door is part of this wall sharing the fireplace, I decided to tac