House Update – June 16 and 17

This weekend was all about the kitchen. Well, all about the kitchen and the porch. Well, all about the kitchen, the porch and the cat.

Saturday morning we finally got the stove installed.

We decided on a slide-in White Fridgidaire. We purchased it from FullHouseAppliances.com and we could not be more pleased with the service. The stove arrived with some cosmetic damage and the store shipped out a new enameled top. That top arrived chipped again and they had no qualms about sending out yet another one. Great customer service, we are very pleased.

Out of boredom with take-out and sandwiches, I broke down and bought a really nice toaster oven this week so we were finally able to cook meat in our new house! Good to know: you can make shake and bake in a toaster oven. We got this really nice Oster one. I highly recommend it. With the convection mode, things cook nice and even and you can really control the temperature much better than with other toaster ovens.

It’s just $79 and was a super life-saver. I regret not buying it earlier! I had it for just 3 days before the stove was installed. I should have bought it right when we moved in!

The other purchase of the week was this nice dehumidifier. The basement has been quite damp. I think the digging of the porch footings did a number on the soil around the foundation of the house and the fact that the porch doesn’t have gutters yet isn’t helping things. We have a bit of mold growing in the basement and we need a good dehumidifier to keep things dry.

We have also had good luck with these little condensate pumps. We have on on the furnace, one on the hot water heater, and one on the dehumidifier. They come with the tubing which is handy though we have had to buy extra tubing to run over to the drain. Not a big deal all in all and they are super easy to install.

We bought it on Amazon, as usual. We spend more than $600 a month on Amazon. It’s amazing how much your spending habits change when you can comparison shop online and when you come to rely on the convenience of 2nd day delivery. We price check everything at home depot with Amazon.com to see what we can save. In general, you don’t pay sales tax with Amazon but that’s quickly changing as states wise up to the loop-hole. My pocketbook is sad but I know it’s the right thing to do..

On Saturday, after getting the dehumidifier set up and the stove in, Stefan went to work making a jig for the balusters. The toe-rail of the porch is a 2 piece design with a peaked top to prevent water from resting on the toe rail. This requires that we cut a notch out of the balusters.

To make things more complicated, we are putting the balusters on the diagonal. We built a nice jig to ensure we are cutting the balusters at the correct angle.

While Stefan was working on these odds and ends, I continued painting the handrails and toerails and the sides of the balusters. I used a very nice spray gun that I LOVE! I talk about it here:

House Update – June 9/10

Here you can see my handsome husband in his ppe (personal protective equipment) cutting balusters all day.

Two hundred and ten balusters later, we have all the pieces cut so the porch guys can start finishing up that project. We primed all the pieces and elected not to paint them since we really want to spend our time getting the inside of the house up to par. The primer will protect the wood until we get around to painting everything with the Sherwin Williams Duration Exterior paint we are planning on using on the porch.

Vector is starting to get curious about the rest of the house. We need to put some doors back on the gutted rooms and we should be able to let Vector have full reign of most of the house in a couple weeks. For now he is confined to the piano room and the bedroom. We do bring him into the kitchen when we are working on dinner but we set a scrap piece of MDF across the door and he’s got maybe another week until a 2 foot barrier will no longer be an obstacle.

Sarah