Labor Day

Just like last year, Labor Day was true in fact as well as name. We didn't get much done on Sunday, either, because we had to wash clothes, get groceries, and make a trip out to my husband's old boss's house on Vashon Island. For those of you that don't know, this guy's a pretty incredible landscape architect, and his garden was AMAZING. You can see it at http://www.davidpfeiffer.com/project_vashon.html (website by yours truly). His house is amazing, too. We got the tour, and it's so tasteful, beautiful, well-crafted, and comfortable. It gives the feeling of being sheltered, yet living outdoors. I want to copy so much of it for our house. Anyway, we had a really lovely time, but due to the fact it was quite a trek from the rat hole, we ended up using all our afternoon and evening. It was worth it, though.

Monday, though, we FINALLY got down to business. First, we tore out the wallboard in the kitchen.

Then we realized how horrible the condition of the studs was. So we had to rip those out. We did that very carefully, since they were holding up the wall. We managed to do it without bringing the house down.

Cutting of nails was involved. Pretty to watch, what with the sparks and all, and luckily there weren't too terribly many of them.

Once we got everything reframed, we realized that the doorways were missing headers. We consulted our framing books, and then pulled out the work we'd just done and re-framed again with headers.

Then we realized the header for the new kitchen door (on the right in the photos) was too short - there was a 1.5 inch difference between the width of the top of the door and the bottom. But we were just too tired to tear it out again, and so we called it a night. We think it'll all work out well when everything's framed right, though.