bookcases tagged posts

Paving the way to more progress

Yeah, OK, I couldn’t resist the pun, but there’s been some important work on surfaces inside and out this week. Let’s get right to it.

Last weekend Bill asked me if I could come down to the house so we could lay out the final plan for the asphalt part of the driveway, and of course I said yes. You may remember that we’d done this once before, but with all the construction traffic, the lines we’d painted on the dirt were long gone. This time, though, the paving company was going to be out the next day.

This is a very exacting process: “Let’s start here, go straight to about there, curve it around to there, then there, and then straight again to there.”

“Here?”

“No, over to your right a little… yeah, there.”

Put down some rocks to mark the spots, and then paint them.

Painting the rocks

Anybody who’s been in t...

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Tile, (Counter) Tops, and Tight Fits

The work on the interior “fittings,” if you will, of the house is now underway in earnest. With the cabinets installed in the pantry, kitchen, and bathrooms, one of the next steps is to “template” the counter tops. “Templating” means getting their exact–and I do mean exact–measurements. As George, the installer said, if they get them just wrong, a thousand-dollar slab of granite is ruined and his company ends up doing the job “for free.” Well, not free, exactly, but they don’t make any money on it. This is definitely a “measure twice (or three or four times, cut once” kind of job.

So with interior designer Edith supervising…

Edith supervises

…and George measuring down to the 32nd of an inch…

George measuring

…I was, um, supervising. Yeah, supervising! That’s it! (OK, and taking pictures...

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