The first day of the rest of our lives

Yes this was the weekend that we finally finished the "old wood." Now we have moved onto the "new wood" that Steve spent an entire day purchasing last week.

Saturday, I finished sanding and staining the last of the boards and stripped a few small ones left. Closure, it's a good thing.

Steve bought a new router so we could make the profiles we need.

He used the router to make door casing with rounded edges. For this he used a round-over bit.





Here's a close up of the finished profile.

On Sunday I sanded them all (about 24 boards in all) and we stained them. Steve hand-sanded his kitchen shelving unit and then experimented with stain. He found the right mix, but when he tried staining the maple, it came out very splotchy.

So he stopped and went to the computer to do a google search. It turns out that maple is one of the hardest woods to stain. There are many different methods and Steve is going to do some research and decide what to do.
Many of them involve sealing the wood first and then putting a stain over that. Sometimes shellac is used as a sealer, sometimes other solvents. More to come later on that. This is Steve's first attempt using maple. Up to this point it's been all oak and one teak medicine cabinet.



...and in other news, the healing begins in our kitchen. My strategy for dealing with this disruption is... I don't look at it. I keep my head down and don't look at it. Seems to be working for now.








It was a super busy weekend between "the wood" and the fact that my sister and her husband came in with my 7 month old nephew. Of course, I had to get in as much baby-time as possible.

I'm sure you can see why.