Dski made me stay home last weekend to tend to some of the sorely overlooked honey-do's at our principal home. It was an awkward time for her to come down on me (is there ever really a "right" time?) cuz we were/are at the peak of fall colors....and I wanted to be at the pond taking it all in. The rain and weather this year seems to have been conducive to nice colors. It's a small window of time, and just like spending mindless time staring across the water, framing it with a kaleidescope of color makes it even more transfixing. So, I did such a good job that she joined me on a return trip back to our LNP project this past weekend. Good thing, too....the colors are just at or past peak and the leaves are fallin' like rain. - Anyway, we did get make some progress on the gar/apt. Since we now have our new living quarters pretty much tightened up for the final leg of development, we are still minus a bathroom. This includes a shower. In fact, we still haven't scraped together the dough to have a water well drilled (although that is moving up the priority list). We carry in our drinking water, use pond water in 5 gal buckets to flush the single toilet we temporarily installed, and take baths right in the pond. The impending cold weather will negatively affect pond baths, and a frozen pond will make it difficult to draw buckets to flush the toilet, thereby pushing the water well up the wish list. Anyway, if and when we do get a well, we will need a bathroom to hook it up to. This will be our next goal; finishing one of the baths...the master bath. We have had a wonderful stretch of warm weather here in the midwest. No rain (yeah, pond is way down...maybe 2 feet plus), but the daytime temps are 80'ish for the past week. We wanted to get some of the jobs completed that are best done in warm weather. We mixed and troweled thin-set mortar, cut cement board, screwed down and pretty much finished both bath floors.
and the master bath
A little more taping in the master bath, but both floors are ready for ceramic tile. With this much done, the next step is setting the fiberglass shower stall and hooking it up to the drain that awaits just below. This will be a big step since it will allow us to use water warmed up on the propane stove and hung from a bucket above the shower stall. Primitive? You bet...and a big improvement over wading into 50 degree pond water to take a bath. - - OK, back to the fall colors... It does my heart good to get up before the sun and stand at our new little kitchenette area as the sun rises. Coffee never tasted so good.
And at the end of the day, as the sun sets, I am reassured that we picked decent finish colors for our gar/apt.
