Chapter 39...Decorating And Glass Etchings

Off Grid...Chapter 39 Good morning everyone. I hope everyone has had a great week. Mike and I had a fantastic one. We started doing dome of the finishing touches and we did some decorating. Really, we did. Monday 12-1 This morning we got a call from our gas company. They are coming to hook up our dryer. Yeah. Mike finished working on the dryer vent and the young man hooked up my dryer. Woo Hoo. Now our towels won't be like cardboard. It's nice having soft clothes again. I haven't had a dryer since last spring. Although on nice days I will still hang the laundry outside. After that we went to town to look for pictures, frames, accessories, etc. We stopped at K-mart which we usually don't do because our local K-mart is horrible. Anyway, we actually scored there. We got frames, a mirror, bathroom towel bars, a clock, and kitchen canisters. Next stop Wal-mart to look at lamps again. We got new shades and 2 new lamps. We'll see how they work. We got home, unloaded the car, and started to play with all of out "toys". We changed the lamp shade in the bedroom. Mike installed the towel ring and toilet paper holder. Then we installed the mirror above the fireplace. If we can find something better we may actually change that out. Tuesday 12-2 This morning I got up early and started re-organizing my kitchen. Mike helped me by installing the 2 shelves that came with my pantry. Of course the factory drilled the wrong size holes inside the pantry and provided the wrong hardware. Good thing I have Mike to fix all these factory errors lol. We still need to get more shelves but it's a start. I have a 7 foot pantry and all they give is 2 shelves. We got a call from UPS. They are using some excuse why they are 6 days late with our package and they want to know of we can meet them at the road to get our package. Of course, so Mike runs down and gets our package. The etched glass transoms for above our door. I hope they aren't broken because they've been on the truck for awhile now. Mike brought them up to the house and we opened up the box which thankfully was packed really well. The glass was very cold and we could hardly see any etchings so we put them against the wall to acclimate to the house temperature. Mike gets the miter saw out and starts to cut the trim for the glass frames. First he measures the opening above the door front and back. Then he has to cut 8 pieces of trim to those measurements for each door. I help him install the trim to make the border, then he caulks it, and I hand him the glass. Mike puts the glass in place and then we add the next 4 pieces of trim and nail them in. Here is Mike installing the glass. Only two more to go. It's night time and we are looking at the glass. We are a little disappointed because we can barely make out the etchings. We are hoping they will look better in the daylight. Wednesday 12-3 Ah, daylight. Crossing our fingers as we check out the glass. We really wanted these 3 pieces to be a focal point in the house. They are not what we hoped for but they are ok and at least our openings are closed in. The bears(which is the lightest etching). The turkeys. The deer. Time to do some more decorating. Mike hung my kitchen clock. We may have to see if we can paint the hands black to make it easier to read. Mike also hung my bear above the sink until I can find the right sized mirror and my new kitchen canisters are in place. Next we put the generator on and got out the iron. Mike is going to install the end cap for my counter top. When you buy Formica counter tops they make a piece that can be ironed on and trimmed down to cover the raw edge. Here is Mike ironing the end cap on. And filing and sanding it down. While he is doing that I iron the new tablecloth we bought. It's much better than the sheet we originally had on the table lol. I love our glass table but we need to keep the top covered until we finish all the construction. We also hung some picture frames. We needed to find 6 pictures for the frames and believe it or not we had a really hard time finding pictures. We really need to start taking more "people" pictures and getting them developed. Now it's starting to look more like a home. Thursday 12-4 Today we head out again to look for more pictures. We are determined to get our house decorated. We drove to a different town a little farther away. We stopped in more than 15 stores and found nothing for the house. On our way back we saw another cabin store so we stopped in. We spotted a great picture for our living room so we bought it. It almost didn't fit in the jeep but we made it. On our way back home we stopped at Lowe's(again) to look around. We found an area rug for the living room that we both like. Now we are very happy. We found 2 big things for he house. We hate coming home empty handed. We get everything home and now we are really excited about pulling the house together. Unfortunately our walls need to be touched up before we can hang anything. Mike is determined to finish. Last week he filled in out cracks with spackle. Tonight he starts to sand and I clean up the mess. Then he paints. We will need 2 or 3 coats in some spots. Mike painting. We work our way around the main room sanding, touching up, and cleaning. Hopefully the walls will look great by morning. Friday 12-5 Woo Hoo. The walls look great. We move all the furniture away from the walls. I wipe down all the floor trim and clean the floor. Mike follows me and does the touch up on the floor trim. While we have the trim paint out I set up the new pack of floor trim in the kitchen and paint them. I did a much better job this time. After that I gave Niki a bath "before" we put the new rug down. We put all the furniture back and I clean the floors again. Mike and I hang our new picture and out the rug down. Now we just need a few more things for this room. So far we are very pleased. Our living room so far. Saturday 12-6 We tried the other cabin store again. We are in search of a new lamp, another picture, and something for the table between the chairs. They didn't have anything we could use but the owner's mother said she would check the inventory at their third store when she goes next week. Hopefully she will call us with good news. Not much else happened today. We "talked" about doing the closet in the bathroom but that's as far as we got lol. Mike did install the towel bar and the tp holder. Sunday 12-7 We did absolutely nothing on the house today. It was freezing outside, brr. Little by little the house is coming together. We are very excited that it is becoming very comfortable. That was our week in the Mike and Lisa world. Have a great week. Lisa