We’re back!

It is true, we took a bit of a break. Life got in the way in the form of a surgery, job turmoil (looking at you, you fickle tech industry), a terrible flu, and a couple of weeks back in Ireland to restore, renew, and re-energize.

I’m not sure about the energized part, but with an 80%-done kitchen, over a year of hard labor in the books, and a wall still full of construction bits and bobs, we know it’s time to get on the stick and wrap this baby up.

Despite the overall break, we have been working, albeit slowly and hodgepodgey (yes, I would like credit for coining that word.)

A little dab here, a little dab there, and tiny bits of things are getting done. We’ll make one big push beginning in May, and if our timeline is right, and no more hurdles rise up, we should be posting some before and after pictures before the summer months arrive.

We thought board and batten was going to be a quick and easy (and entirely palatable) answer to our, “what to do with the outside wall of an 11 ft by nearly 9 ft island?” question. The palatable part was a no-brainer. After all, we have done this before and we’ve liked board and batten. And, better yet, as experienced board and batteners (!), we figured a good weekend would finish the job.

(Insert a big fat HA! to that grand plan.)

You’ll remember, here’s where we started:

Nothing went right on this task. The pony wall was crooked, there were so many waves and divots and seams that the correcting part can be fully blamed for our fleeing the country for a couple weeks. If we never have to do that again, it will be too soon. The correcting part, not the fleeing the country part…

But we did press on, and I believe in the last update, progress was made with laying the battens.

But then, as these projects so often do, we got stumped on a small thing. How to finish out the ends so that this doesn’t look like an amateur job. If I told you it took us weeks of contemplation and nailing one piece after another of finished molding before ripping it off and starting anew, you would think we were crazy. So, I won’t tell you that’s what we did…

We still need to add scribe after the painting is finished, but we settled on a simple and clean finish for the end pieces. We just couldn’t stomach the options any longer, figuring getting something done is better than getting nothing done and we can always rip it out down the road if we don’t like it.

But, the task that neither one of us enjoys is the wood filling and caulking. A necessary part for a clean, professional look, and given that we have a lot of bumps and divots, all the help we can get to smooth things out, is necessary.

So for the past two weeks, we have been nail-setting popped nails, wood-filling nail holes, caulking all of the seams (and there are many), and finally, sanding. Did I mention we sanded? We sanded and sanded and sanded.

Caulking those seams really makes a difference and now we are proceeding to the ridiculous looking, but equally necessary, task of closing our eyes and feeling up our island. The island may enjoy the process, but us? Not so much. Still, it helps us pinpoint exactly what still needs to be…sanded.

Next task is to prime the whole kit and caboodle. Twice, actually. That’s the easy part — although, every time I say, “that’s the easy part” that little voice inside says, “hold my beer…”