Last day

Well, today was the last day Wayne and Gina will be here, and I'm happy to say, we accomplished pretty much everything we wanted to do. We definitely could not have done it without them.

Matt spent the morning working on adding sister joists to one of the beams in the basement:

 Then, he started putting back the electrical wires that we had to take down when we put the beam up:

While this was happening, he hit a snag, well, actually, a spark when trying to put the giant light in the front room back up:

Luckily, it tripped the breaker before any harm was done, but it did throw an hour hitch in the plans as the offending wire had to be removed and rewired. On the up side, our basement is a little bit safer than it was this morning because they had a 15 amp outlet with a 14 gauge wire on a 20 amp breaker, which is not to code. Now its a 20 amp outlet with 12 gauge wire, much better. He also pinned up all the wires in the killing room, and replaced the light (which was pretty ambivalent about turn or staying on, and its scary back there in the dark! so it had to go).

While he was doing that, Wayne and Gina kept going on the kitchen

Gina removed all the tiles from the other side of the sink and then Wayne fixed up the electric in the bathroom and they put up all new drywall. So now our bathroom has two shiny new matching GFI outlets at the same height:

And, Gina detached the mirror from that silly little cabinet thingy that was under it, which i always hated and which is now in the trash. Of course, this means that the wall paper remnants will remain visible for some time, but somehow, I find them less visually offensive.

AND, the main event, which I've been waiting for all weekend. The installation of the butcher block!! Since the dishwasher is also in the island, we wanted to make sure that the heat and steam wouldn't warp the block. So, Wanye came up with the great idea of using aluminum to insulate and keep out the moisture.

Then, it was time. Here's Wayne installing the butcher block

 

And here is what it looked like while I was conditioning it with mineral oil. You can really see how it deepens the color. It'll take a couple more passes with the oil before its ready for use, but it looks so pretty, I'd probably be content just to stare at it and never actually use it.

I can't wait to get the backsplash up and refinish the rest of the counter top.

Oh, and we did find a nice surprise at the end of the day. Turns out our under sink plumbing has been slowly working its way loose. Nothing like thinking you are done for the day and then finding a leaking sink. But we managed to patch it enough that we can still use the right side.

Matt and I will take a closer look tomorrow.