Cache-ing Fish

This last week brought the smooth sailing and nice, easy progress. That's not to say we didn't work hard, just that (thankfully!) nothing seemed to go awry this week. The universe must have respected my birthday week!

We started off the week with some more help from my parents. I had wracked my brain about how to fix the wiring we had done last week to really do what I wanted. What the electrician did was run a wire connecting power from the ceiling fan over to a new location so we could have a chandelier over our table. It was on the same circuit as the fan though, so if you flipped the switch they both went on/off. I REALLY wanted the light to be separate, I didn't care as much if the fan was on, but I wanted to be able to have the fan on and the chandelier off. Reading this, I do realize I sound very particular, and to be fair, I am. Just thinking of an open-concept house with a dining room/great room combo of sorts, you can usually choose to turn the chandelier on or off without impacting the other lighting in the room. I REALLY wanted this. After doing some digging on my own, I called my dad back and explained exactly what I wanted. He said he could make it work. He and my mom headed to our house to undo everything we paid to have done last week and fix it to be what we wanted. Dad ran a fully new circuit for a light, with its own light switch! He had to crawl up in our extremely small attic, and use a snake to pull the wires into position, but he had it done in around an hour. AMAZING! He hung up the fan in the new light location to test the wiring and switch (it was perfect)

He even cut a perfectly circular hole in the ceiling (the other guy cut a lemon-shaped hole, ha!), so even that is better than it was. It's exactly what I wanted and I could not be happier!

Once the new wiring was in place we needed to patch and sand the ceiling some more. I will not miss this part of the reno, although I do feel I am dragging less when it comes time to fill and sand because I do appreciate how much BETTER everything looks.

That brings us to the next part of our project. I've been working from the couch now that it's accessible and not covered in dust and the light in the late morning shows quite a few flaws in the ceiling we already painted, so we decided to fill and sand some more since we had the ceiling paint out anyway. That still needs an additional coat, but I do believe we have it much closer to "done".

Once we finished with the filling/sanding/painting in the living room we were still waiting on the large patches of spackle to dry in the dining room, so we decided to work on something else (no rest for the wicked!). Our bedroom and the guestroom were the first two rooms we painted, and we've learned a lot since then. When we painted our room we didn't like the way the corners where the ceiling and walls met (due to the popcorn removal, they were really bumpy and not in great shape), so we decided to do crown moulding eventually to cover it and make it look more "finished". We bought the crown moulding weeks ago and even put a coat of paint on it, but it's been sitting in the garage since then.

We made our millionth trip to Home Depot (and Lowe's, actually) and bought a Kreg Crown Moulding Jig. Scott is a HUGE fan of his Kreg Pockethole jig, and we figured we would like this just as much.

If you don't know anything about crown moulding, you should know that it's notoriously "finicky". The moulding sits at an angle on the wall and ceiling and you're always cutting angles for the corners, there's some math involved, and you have to cut it upside down. The jig made this so much easier, but still a relatively tough project, but 100% worth it.

When we first got the moulding up Scott was NOT happy. He was super disappointed and ready to tear it all down. We used the nail gun to attach it to the wall and getting the pressure right along with the angle to securely hold it meant there were a ton of extra holes. Between the holes and the seams (we needed more than one board for each wall, so a total of 8 joints around the room), there were a ton of "gaps", plus the ceiling bows up/down in a few locations, so it looked.. rough.

I convinced him to let me fill the holes and caulk around the edges and see how we felt. It was a complete 180 from where we started. Scott's exact words were "we're doing this everywhere, right?!". The filling did it's magic and it looked great! We still need to sand, probably fill a bit more and put another coat on the moulding, but it looks AWESOME!

Don't mind the coverless vent, we are re-painting them and didn't want them up until the ceiling is 100% touched up. Also, the "now" is still before additional sanding and the final coat of trim paint, but it is so much better and the room looks much more finished (even without the vent cover and floors!).

We were able to start getting paint on the walls in the dining room (my goal for the week!). I've been singing (to the tune of "All I want for Christmas") "All I want for mybirthday is apainteddiningroooooom" (had to smoosh the words together to keep the tune) to Scott all week and he delivered! We don't have color up yet, but a coat of primer and the first coat on the ceiling makes me happier than a clam!

Sunday was my birthday so Scott gave me the best gift ever, alone time! Kidding! He had a chartered fishing trip that he was supposed to take a few weeks ago with a friend and his family, but it was rained out and rescheduled for Sunday. Scott left early for his fishing trip and I headed out to go on a bike ride and geocaching with my parents, neice and nephew.

If you've never geocached before I would HIGHLY recommend it. It's outside (social distancing approved!) and it's essentially a treasure hunt. There's an app called "Geocaching" that you download and there are coordinates for "caches" loaded in. You click on one near you and it will navigate you to it (not like Google maps, but it gives you a directional arrow towards the cache and tells you how far and you have to find it). They're hidden all over, in every city. We used to go geocaching on the weekends when I was a kid. We'd load up in the jeep, put the top down and Steve Miller Band in the CD player and head out for a day of treasure hunting. We've done a good job of hooking Zane and Miah, and Scott and I have the pleasure of being able to say we've found North America's southern most geocache (in Key West). It's so much fun!

We searched for four, and found 3. Sometimes they get misplaced or a muggle, a non-geocacher in this instance, finds it and takes it, not realizing what it is. One cache was particularly fun, it was a coconut cut in half (to create a little box) and rigged on a pulley system in a tree, so the kids pulled the string to lower the coconut to them. So neat!

We also came across a gopher tortoise just hanging out (last photo). These guys are pretty big and all over the place.

Scott's day of fishing was almost as fun as my day, he and his fellow fisherman all brough in quite a catch.

They caught Cobia (the two big fish), Bonito, Red Grouper, Kingfish, Grunts, Mangrove Snapper, and Lane Snapper. We have fish for dayyyysss in the fridge.

Try as we might, we have not caught fish like this while out on our own, but they were also about 10 miles off shore, which is further than we've ventured in our little boat.

Sunday evening we were both in bed early, exhausted from the wonderful weekend.

This week I have some time off and hope to get some non-house projects at least started. You'd think with all of the house projects we have going I wouldn't want to start anything else, but I can't help myself, I'm a DIY fiend!