Stay-cation: Day Two

I was going to post this entry last night and actually get caught up with my idiotic scheme, but we had our little Thanksgiving dinner last night and seeing as how it was just the four of us, and two of us don't drink wine, I couldn't let such a nice bottle go to waste, could I?

Well, that and we didn't actually sit down to eat until 9pm. But mostly the wine...

As I mentioned in Day One, our primary goal of this stay-cation is to finish the downstairs bathroom. Of course, a lot of what we're doing is painting, that means a lot of waiting around for things to dry. Which means side projects!

The first order of business yesterday was to clean the walls and ceiling in the bathroom in preparation for painting. Once that was done (and we had waited for the walls to dry), we replaced the fan motor - which cleaned up pretty nice:



It's still not the quietest bathroom fan in the world, but it beats having to rip out half the ceiling to install a new one.

Unfortunately, the new fan grill we bought is slighter smaller than the original, so the War Department had to caulk the edges of the hole around the fan to pretty it up a bit. Which meant another two-hour wait before we could paint the caulking.

Given that it was unseasonably warm outside (highs of 19 degrees!), we headed out to see what we could make of the sunroom issue. Imagine our surprise when we pulled off the rotten trim to find that the room WAS actually designed properly! The roof flashing has a proper drip-edge on it, and the siding extends well past the sill plate on the bottom. We're pretty sure the trim was added after the permit and inspection had been passed - it was obviously not installed professionally, and completely compromised the overall design.

Once the trim was removed, we pulled back the rocks in the little ditch around the sunroom so they weren't right up against the siding.






I think we're still going to wrap some heavy plastic around that corner to keep any more water from getting in through that huge crack, but the good news is the sunroom should make it through the winter without too many modification.

While we were out there (and after mowing the lawn yet AGAIN), we also pulled the earth away from the wall outside the kitchen where it had piled up against the trim:



Yeah, looks pretty bad, but it'll the keep the bugs and the moisture from wicking up the stucco and rotting out the sill plate.

Well, by that time, the caulking had dried, so we painted the bathroom ceiling, went out to Rona and ran some other errands, and then came home and put a second coat on:



(I like that soft pink a lot, by the way. It's going to look really sharp with the baby-blue walls and creamy, butter-yellow trim.)

And then we watched some baseball, did some other chores and eventually got around to making our Thanksgiving dinner. Not exactly a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, I must say: pepperberry chicken and mushroom risotto:





Damn tasty, though.