fickle flooring and fancy facades

A workplace injury has put husband out of work for at least another month. The good thing is the injury will likely heal entirely in due time, the injury was on his non-dominant hand and he can draw unemployment insurance during the convalescence. He can also complete (albeit slowly) the tasks that have been piling up like: putting up light fixtures, replacing door hardware and increasing our shelving storage for all the preserved goodies I keep generating.

The two looming projects that we are chipping away at: exterior finish and kitchen cabinets. 

The house had three layers of siding:

And has had building wrap as the exterior finish for a part of the back of the house for ohhh....two years now :) Originally we had our hearts set on a pre-finished painted product by Cape Cod but as you can imagine, when we heard the hardware contractor's desk guy refer to it as the "mercedes of exterior finishes" more than once, we had to change our minds due to cost. The main draw (other than the custom colour selection option that would have given us our bee pollen yellow house - sigh!) was that the paint finish was guaranteed for 25 years to never need repainting. Alas, at 9K for trim and boards, we opted instead for a locally sourced Eastern White Cedar shingle in clear combined with Cape Cod pre-finished trim pieces (comparative price: 5K). If all goes according to plan, we will not need to address the exterior of the house for decades, because both the (completely unfinished) shingles and pre-painted boards are supposed to have very long lifespans. 

We are not terribly keen on the monochromatic result of a greyed-with-age cedar shingle but it will have to do. I will not be spending my precious time painting the house - I did it one too many times already. And it certainly is historically accurate, as we found out upon removing the asbestos shingle layer carefully:

A bit boring, but not too bad

Our trim will be white

I think this had white paint on it at one time

As for inside, we've hammered out the details of the cabinetry & appliance placements and are now currently arguing (again and again) over pre-fab Ikea drawers sets (faster, cheaper) versus handmade plywood drawers and separate rail systems (custom sizes). I would prefer to go for a joyride to Boston for the weekend (soon) and stock up on drawer slides at the big box store but my (one-handed) husband prefers to build them himself. When we are not arguing, we are working on finishing the floors. 

Remember when I had started the back parlour in a white endless circle design? Ya well the second, unwritten part of that post is that I screwed up so royally in my design (that itself was terribly unforgiving anyway) that it stayed half-finished for a month until I summoned the courage to paint over the first design, choose and cut out from mylar a second design, and begin fresh. This time nothing was stopping me, and I got it completely finished and varnished in about a week.

Retro-cool pattern, white on beige. 

Pattern Attack!

The half-finished floor had, in that intermediate month, morphed into some sort of metaphor for the house as a whole. I hated that it was unfinished but I didn't have the motivation to tackle it again.  Now we are cruising: only the back room to complete (the one with the patio door). Looking up.