Prepping the dining room

Beastly hot here, making us feel not quite so motivated. However, we're anticipating the installation of the new doors and moving the old windows soon, so it's time to clear out the dining room to make way.



First, the dry bar in the corner goes. Lucky for us, it wasn't attached in any way at all, save for the Romex simply poking out of a hole in the wall, through another hole in the wall of the bar, and into a (non-attached, of course) junction/outlet box inside. Grr. Oh well -- the circuit's exactly where we'll want a wall outlet, so it'll be easy to repurpose. The cabinets against the wall were pretty easy to remove, too, and the blank wall is ready for its new window.



Best of all, our friend Brigid (another Weatherby Laker in fact) has a great use for the bar, and reports it works very well where she installed it after picking it up this morning. We love to give things a new life instead of throwing them out.

Speaking of repurposing, the new grading in the backyard left an enormous step down from the deck without a use. So I cut it into two pieces, which I attached at a right angle to each other. Then I took the leftovers cut off from the top of the front-porch support posts to create new legs -- and we have a really swell new bench on the back deck, which will give us great party seating. Best of all was the cost: Sweat and sweat alone. Even the screws were leftovers from another project.



And speaking of the back deck, the portland cement dried and I filled in that nasty window well. All you see now is as it should have always been: Heavy clay left over from digging out the posts on the front porch.




Back to the dining room for a moment: I'd measured when we moved in and determined the china cabinet wouldn't fit under the soffit on the east wall -- the most logical position for the furniture in the room. So instead, we'd planned on parking it on the west wall, where it would work, but wouldn't be the most elegant solution. Well, after some exploratory drywall chopping revealed the bad news that we couldn't get rid of the soffit (darned ductwork in the way), Jeff asked me to measure again, because he thought the cabinet would fit underneath.



I was wrong. He was right. It fits and actually looks great (and will be much better post-popcorn).

Tomorrow night the library upstairs gets cleared out and perhaps the beginnings of de-popcorning.

Oh, and here's a picture of Tequila being weird.