Merry Christmas Acre-Heads!
I am sorry I have not posted for a while. Life has been very busy lately. I had a scheduled business trip to New York City, followed immediately by an unscheduled trip to Wilmington, Delaware. Then my mom ended up in hospital for a couple days (she is on the mend now) and of course working on M. T. Acres.
Since my last post, Tina got the last of the painting done, except for some touch-up of course.
She also got the last coats of varnish on the base cabinets in the kitchen. We also got all of the cabinets permanently mounted in the kitchen.
We got the countertops ordered for the kitchen. They came out and measured for them a week or so ago. We ended up getting the top-of-the-line Cambria quartz countertops for less than half what I expected to pay for them!
The company that is making them is a mom and pop operation out of Tucson and are extremely easy to work with. They should be calling us this week to schedule installation.
Once the countertops are done, we will be able to get the plumber back to hook up all of the gas appliances as well as the furnace and hot water heater.
We are also trying to get the electrician back to install Tina’s double ovens and finish off the electrical work. That, however, is proving to be more difficult. The electrician came out and looked over what needed to be done and gave us a shopping list of the parts he wanted us to get (LED lights for the cabinets, doorbell kit, etc.). However, getting him to come back to actually do the work is proving to be difficult. If we cannot get a firm commitment from him within the next few days, I may have to find somebody else.
I continued work on the vanity for the master bathroom. The joinery for it turned out to be more challenging than I expected because I wanted it to look more like an old fashioned sideboard rather than traditional cabinetry.
I started with the legs and face pieces. Only two of the legs were identical so I had to be careful to make sure I was cutting the correct joinery on each piece. I was very pleased with myself that I did not make any mistakes.
The face pieces are joined to the legs using a mortise and tenon joint which is extremely strong and one of favorite joints to cut.
Once I got all of the joinery rough cut to size, I made a jig to cut the angles on the legs.
Then I glued up the subassemblies for the face frames and spent some quality time with a shoulder plane doing a final fitting of the tenons into the mortises.
Finally, I was able to start gluing the front of the cabinet together.
Once the front was partially assembled, I cut and machined the pieces for the sides, bottom and back. Then I glued the whole thing together.
Once the center was glued and perfectly square, I just repeated the process for each side.
The final product came out looking pretty good I think.
We decided to make a wooden top for the vanity so it looks more like a piece of furniture rather than a cabinet. So that meant edge gluing the top. Edge gluing quarter sawn oak is a pain in the neck because quarter sawn oak tends to have a lot of knots and imperfections due to how it is milled from the tree. Finding several pieces that are free of knots and moderately straight for more than 6 feet was a task.
Once it was glued, it was just a matter of cutting it to final size, then sanding and sanding and sanding. But the final result really does look pretty good.
I discovered that my travel points from some hotels and airlines can be used to make purchases on Amazon. So Tina used my points from Hilton Hotels to buy all of the plumbing fixtures for the bathrooms. She got this sink for the master bathroom.
After she got all the stuff we need to complete both bathrooms (except for tile), I still had enough Hilton points to get a new miter saw and cart for free!
Next, I need to figure out if I can do the same thing with my Marriott and Holiday Inn points.
We also got the moulding ordered for all of the doors. Finding red oak moulding in Arizona turned out to be a tougher job than we imagined. Very few places stock it and the ones that do, charge an arm and a leg for it. As an example, very poor quality red oak moulding at Homie Depot is going for over $4 per foot!
We did find a place that could order it for us at about $2 per foot (which is still expensive). Hopefully it should be in this week.
In the meantime, we got most of the base moulding installed in the laundry room (except around the doors), and got the washer and dryer installed.
That is a BIG deal since we can now leave clothes at M. T. Acres rather than having to schlep them back and forth from the rental house!
Finally, we started moving some “comfort” items over from the rental house. Tina brought a bunch of cooking stuff and some more comfortable lawn chairs. Of course, I brought my Big Green Egg!
It has been getting a little cooler, especially in the evenings. There was even a little snow in the upper elevations on the mountains.
So we tested out the wood stove. It works great. Last night, it heated up the house so much, it was uncomfortably warm.
So from Tina and I to all of you, Merry Christmas and have prosperous and blessed New Year!