Turkey Day and Loose Ends

Another long long weekend - hope all of you had a great turkey day! I have to admit, I was a bit shocked and sorry to see my own mother making so many dishes from a bag.... gravy from a bag, stuffing from a bag, green beans from a bag.... I just always imagine those grandmother thanksgivings from years past.

My grandmother actually majored in home economics in college (can you imagine that?) and was an amazing cook until she recently took ill. Her thanksgivings started out with her famous hot crab dip and my personal favorite, a snack we referred to as, "The Cheese Things." These were served with an array of fancy crackers, which it was my job to arrange nicely on a platter.

Then the meal itself - if you still had room for it - included a huge turkey, always on a bed of parsley, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, scalloped potatoes, squash or sweet potatoes, fresh green beans with almonds.... I think I remembered everything. And all from scratch. For desert the classic pecan and pumpkin pies with homemade whipped cream. While we waited for the pies, we ate After Eight mints and other mint candies and drank coffee.

Even my mother made some outrageous thanksgiving meals over the years - her homemade cornbread stuffing is still the most unforgettable stuffing I've ever had.

But in thinking of all this last Thursday, I realized that I can't just sit around dreaming of thanksgivings past. If I want it, there's no better way than to do it myself. (Especially now that the mud/dining room is together.) All I need is a table and some more chairs and my grandmother's recipe book. Mike's seen how to fry a turkey at least twice on Good Eats and is just dying to try it. So why not?

I won't want to travel with a baby this time next year anyhow - so why not stay home and host? At least try. And you're all invited! Well... maybe not all of you house bloggers. Sorry. House isn't that big.

Well, enough grandiose schemes.

I'm sure you all want to know what we weekend warriors were up to for four days... ur, three not counting the big TD. (Turkey Day)

Well, I hate to disappoint, but really we spent the time tying up some loose ends. Mike finished sanding and then painted the basement stairway drywall. (I had suggested this project after bringing all the Christmas stuff up from under the basement stairs - thus dust, paint, and who knows what else could just fall down there without further ruining any of our stuff.)


Oh and of course I put up the decorations, cleaned, and basically finished all the other chores. Then Mike had some more winter vehicle maintenance to take care of. Ho-hum, right?

The real exciting moment of the weekend (sad though it may be that we're so excited about this) was purchasing the baby room paint at the DeepHo. I had a 10% off coupon - and with drywall well on its way, I think it was just meant to be. And even Mike was a little disappointed that he couldn't paint yet. He was actually in a painting mood... imagine that. Hopefully that will last until the drywall is done.

Speaking of which, the guys are working on it tonight and should have it finished and ready to prime by the time I get home. I can't believe the paint will be done before Christmas.

Getting a Railing

This past Sunday was just a phenomenal day. Everything went perfectly, despite Mike's pessimistic, "This-is-going-to-suck-i-hate-you" attitude.

The plan, if you remember, included purchasing all the stair railing stuff from Home Depot and installing as much of it as humanly possible in one Sunday. (With the deepHo card paid off and in the clear, I had no problem whatsoever making a purchase over 299 that I would be a year in the clear over.)

When we originally did the upstairs hardwood floors last year, we purchased some stair railing stuff. Three newels with trim, one baluster with trim, and the oak board that all would attach to. But we never got further than installing the oak board, cutting the holes for the newels, and staining the newels. (Newels by the way = posts.)

The balusters I wanted were the black iron ones with the cool swirly designs in the middle, and we had purchased just one to check it out, see how it would look and attach - all that fun stuff. That first time around, I also grabbed a "How-to-Install-These-Things" info brochure.... which then sat aside like everything else for dam near a year.

But, if you remember, railings (or lack thereof throughout the house) were near the top of our new home insurance's list of Stuff To Be Fixed. So, with the card paid and the exterior work on hold, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to tackle this project.

First step - figure out what the heck we needed. Lucky for me, I had saved that "How-to-Install-These-Things" info brochure... And - amazingly - remembered where I had put it! But the brochure only provided some info - for the real deal, we went to the company's website where they had compete print out instructions. Very handy!

So the standard height for the railing had to be between 36" and 41" and the distance between the balusters on a straight run had to be 4" on center. On the stairs, there would be two balusters per stair. Ok cool.

We did some measuring and counting and ended up with a total of 46 balusters. Plus we needed top and bottom trim pieces for each baluster, several sections of railing (at 10', 7', and 3'), hardware to attach railing to newel, a rosette for where the railing meets the wall, some drill attachments, more oak board for our top landing, more stain, and, just for the fun of it, I figured we could get a simple pole-type railing for the basement stairs plus the little railing holder things while we were there.

Wow - does that seem like a lot to you? Because for some reason or another I was worried about making the 299 at the deepHo. HA! Do you know how much just one of those cool iron balusters with the swirly things on it costs?! Nearly $9 a piece. $9 times 46 of them. HAHAHAHAHAAHA! Plus all that other stuff.

Yup. It was around $800 for the whole shebang. Can you believe it? They should make discount packs of the balusters - who ever buys just one anyway?! If we didn't need a railing for the over-the-stairs balcony, the whole thing would have been much more cost effective. We would have only needed 19 balusters. Such is life. You don't think about these things when you're designing your upstairs. You say, "Oh I'll worry about that later."

Anyway - as I said, I was ok with the whole thing after just paying off the card. No sweat.

Back home, we got to work. Our plan was to fit and test and drill everything - then, take it all back apart for staining. It was a lot of work, but pretty much everything went smoothly.

We installed the newels, then measured and marked every 4" for balusters. Then we drilled a 5/8" hole on each mark and stuffed all the balusters in. (Tight fit!)




Next, we measured out and cut the right length of railing and repeated the same 4" measuring, marking, and drilling to match the baluster holes in the floor.Then, we pre-drilled and attached the railing to the newels and double checked the baluster fit. Everything looked great.


We repeated the process on the small 3' section, but added a rosette at one end that would attach to the wall.

It was late in the afternoon at this point and everything was looking great. So we took it all apart. The railings and newels came out, the oak bottom piece came out, and all the balusters were set aside. We brought all the wood downstairs and Mike gave everything a first coat of stain while I cleaned up all the saw dust and wood shavings upstairs.



Nothing else we could do until the stain dried anyway. Plus it would all need a second coat. But since everything is pre-drilled and ready to rock - we shouldn't have any problems getting it up and installed for real this week!


The actual stairs will present different challenges. And, unfortunately, since I spilled paint on them and let it set for a million days - it won't clean off. So we have to sand and refinish all the stair treads. What a pain. But once that's done, figuring out the baluster heights and cutting them shouldn't be so hard. The info brochure outlined a pretty cool method that even I thought I could figure out. Plus, we have a metal chop saw already, so cutting the iron is no big deal either.

I figure we could tackle all that in a day too.... who knows which day....

Losing Steam

No dump. That was the one thing I was really looking forward to and the one thing that we didn't get to do over the weekend. And honestly I can't help but feel that we're losing steam.

Sure, the guys worked Saturday and framed out the porch ceiling - thus ending work on the porch for now. And sure Mike was good enough to put up the new hanging tool storage solution I bought for the garage last week. Looks fabulous - and organized!

And as for me, I cleaned the house. Woo-2Da-Hoo.

It may be partially because I've been feeling rather useless lately. I haven't been able to do a dam thing around the house except for garage cleaning - and that did feel good, don't get me wrong. I just hate stagnating.

And today I paid off the DeepHo card - had to. One of my 0% interest gigs was expiring 8/3 and I knew I wouldn't have another opportunity to pay it all off before then... There goes another $962.28. But it's paid. Phew. A relief and a bummer all at the same time.

As for the coming weeks - progress is unknown. Siding and roofing are next... a lot depends on a lot of other stuff. As usual, nothing comes together easily. I have to wait until my ebay auctions end, Mike has side jobs, we both have bbq's 'n other summer events to attend...

I'm going to try and be pushy, but we all know how that usually goes. Not well. =)