Ruth stops slacking

No member of the McBerkowitz family can play all day every weekend until this house is done, there's too much work to do. Ruth finally got with the program today and completed some key tasks. She learned to measure twice and cut once:

After pulling some wire, she helped nail in those cut boards for the recessed bookshelves:

She then moved to some finish work, installing the hardware on the window seats in the office:

All in all, a pretty productive day for a baby. Next weekend, she'll try her hand at stripping paint and eating applesauce.

Next Up - The Great American Road Trip!

Dear reader - and here I'm speaking primarily to myself, as I'm writing mainly to document these memories for my own future enjoyment - I must apologize. I barely captured anything here about our Costa Rica trip in summer 2024, and nothing at all about our two weeks in Prague and Vienna in 2025. Maybe someday I'll catch up, but in the meantime, let's forge ahead! This summer we're staying in the US. Time for a nearly 6-week long road trip! Why now? Ruth will be a senior in high school next year, so this might (?) be the last time we can all do such a long trip together. Bill quit his job in April (yay for FIRE, aka Financial Independence / Retire Early... but that's a whole separate post), so we've got this short window where we all have the time freedom to do it. Here's the plan: Leg 1 - Raleigh west to Denver. We'll visit Asheville, Chattanooga, Huntsville, Memphis, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Great Sand Dunes National Park along the...

Wall and shower (?!) paint

Last post, I mentioned that we'd painted the walls, so here are finally some pics. The color was pre-selected for us: we found this teal on one of the three layers of walls that we demoed. Bill installed a fan in the wall above the window, which got new trim to match the rest of the house. He also put in two recessed lights in the ceiling, a medicine cabinet, and a light over the cabinet. In the pics below, you'll see only the top half of the wall painted, since the bottom half will have white beadboard. The last picture shows the shower area, painted in a crazy "liquid rubber" waterproofing goo (ShowerSeal). Here's hoping that works.

Floor repairs, before & after

Downstairs, the air return is moved from the middle of the entryway floor (weird!) to under the staircase. Upstairs, a weird area was patched with reclaimed heart pine.

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