Wall-to-wall love for our pets

Hank (AKA The Barking Barfer) helped us choose carpet today for our upstairs rooms. He looked at all the samples and chose the one he wants to barf on most often. We've negotiated with him to do most of his barfing on the concrete floors downstairs, but he is consulting his attorney before he signs anything. It's a good thing he's super adorable!

Maybe we should have laid the sample down on the floor for the most authentic interaction.

The Island Install Two-Step

Hank watches as Bill does the Island Install Two-Step

Our very own Easter egg hunt

Today, we had a lighting consultant in to talk about sconces, fixtures, and monorails and ended up having our own Easter egg hunt, one day late.

As we looked at our kitchen and talked in depth about the recessed can lights that are already there, he asked, "How will you see in this corner of the room? There's no can here." Ummmmm... We looked at how the lights lined up in the room and I said, "I'll bet that there is a can installed under the drywall." The lighting consultant said, "That never happens." Um, no. Actually, it can and does happen with new construction.

We had taken detailed photos before the drywall was installed and were able to quickly determine that the drywall installers had indeed covered the rough electrical connection in that corner for one of our lights. Time to cut a new hole and find the last egg.

A tisket, a tasket, a brown and yellow board with a biscuit

Bill really hates to see stunning redwood go into the landfill, and he has been tucking it away for years just like an Ask This Old House squirrel. We are getting to the point where we are re-using these amazing treasures, sometimes old-growth pieces.

He is working now on some pieces that were salvaged from a job site in Los Altos, kind of a well-known place to the locals that he helped renovate. It is yellow on the painted side that hides amazing redwood below.

The boards are pieced together using a biscuit joiner and glue. Get the raspberry jam!

Boards that came out of a renovation in Los Altos

Hello, Little Biscuit.

Where this yummy redwood will go, along the edge of the stairs.

Assembling, gluing, creating

Great detail in the redwood will look great as trim in our rooms!

Being a carpenter's helper

Kyro likes to be right where she can be most "helpful."

Shimmy, shimmy, no shake

When cabinets are built for a new kitchen, they aren't just framed up and put into place. There is a process for placing them using shims to avoid too much rocking and rolling if any aspect of the cabinets or floors is slightly off. As I left for work this morning, I spent a quick moment to appreciate this still life of a carpenter's tools for setting cabinets.

Yesss-sir-eeee, that's my boy.

Love & Taxes

I've been on a shredding tear lately (HA, see what I did there?) after finding some very old documents in drawers of furniture we put into storage a long time ago. Included in these files were tax info covering about ten years. Ordinarily, very old tax documents might not warrant much other than warming up the shredder and cooling down a favorite beverage. But, the years covered by these old documents were the years we met and married. And (are you on the edge of your seat yet?) in these envelopes of receipts were my paper calendars where I noted mileage and other deductions for that self-employed period in my life. I found these sweet entries in my datebook and they made me laugh. :-)

[Turns out that "Love & Taxes" was a 2015 movie. Did you see it?]

Our first date -- I had to write down his last name and didn't even spell it correctly.
Phillip was my hair stylist, and I have no memory of "Dan".)

Who needs to go shopping when you can go out again with Bill?

Our trip to go talk about wedding rings.
Carol is a longtime friend who is an amazing jeweler in San Francisco.

Taking decorator advice for granite

We hope we are not ones to take our lovely friends for granted, but we did take a friend for granite shopping yesterday. It's time to choose a kitchen counter surface, and we knew that we wanted granite. The options are many and could be overwhelming if we let it be that way. But, alas, we have learned to take these things in bite-sized pieces and getting assistance from a dear friend is so helpful in narrowing down and making a choice.

We visited All Natural Stone in San Jose (recommended by Dan, Dan, the Cabinet Man) and were blown away by the beautiful options. As we walked around, we began to describe what we wanted for our kitchen, and decided that we wanted energy, but not drama, and nothing bland. Some of the shots below are stunningly beautiful, but not for our kitchen. Keep reading to see what we chose!

The showroom staff uses a special forklift attachment to move the slabs around, which we needed them to do so we could see the slab that we eventually chose. Watch the video to see how they do it -- very impressive!

And, here's our choice:

The granite slab for our counters

We had already chosen maple cabinets like this door, and the other sample will be our backsplash.

The backsplash