Non-Thanksgiving Weekend Recap

Thanksgiving weekend has almost come to an end. This year Sandy and I will be celebrating a week later since we've been invited to dinner next weekend. So we took the past three days to get some things done around the house.

Friday night after work we went to Home Depot and picked up eight pieces of door trim and a shelf which I had cut down at the store, to be used as a new top for a hutch.

Saturday morning Sandy made my usual chocolate chip pancakes and bacon, we went for a walk then headed out to run some errands. But first we stopped by our local bistro for latte (it's become our favourite place even though this was only our second visit). I sensed the girl behind the counter was upset about something, turns out she had family trouble so we talked about that for a while. I find this happening more often, I don't know if I'm just meeting people who are more obvious with their emotions or if I've become more attuned to reading body language and facial cues.  Anyway the latte was great, although I still haven't found anyone who makes it like Sandy does.

We ran out to a few places, came home and I installed the last bracket on the new downstairs railing.

(That's Belle on the top step). I'll be giving the handrail a dark espresso colour, it's oak so it'll take the stain well.

Then I replaced the top of the hutch (it's a long story but basically Belle has been hanging out on it and over time it got ruined. She's not up there much at all now). The hutch used to be part of a desk, if you're familiar with Ikea furniture you'll know how it goes together with pegs and metal pins etc. I measured off locations for the lighting and the door and drilled new holes, then used my nail gun to install the new top. A bit of paint to touch up the raw edges and it looks mint:

Oh yeah, when we took the unit off the wall the world's biggest clump of fur fell to the floor. No lie, it was the size of a football. I should have taken a picture.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. Sandy worked in the garden while I did the indoor renos. I tore out the old door and frame in the laundry room which looked like this one (it was mint green):

and with her help installed the new one. If you've ever tried replacing a door, even with a prehung one, you'll know how fussy a job it is checking for level and shimming it etc. Today I also cut and installed three new door frames. Here's how it looks now:

It's only primed, it'll look a lot better once I've filled the holes in the frame and everything's painted white. Nice and fresh. In amongst all the sawdust and power tools I answered some e-mails, we went for walks, read etc.

So, how was your weekend?