my kind of cable

I wanted to teach myself cable knitting basics over the winter, but was somehow too busy...now that Shawn and I are working on the business together, instead of each working on a big project on our own (he on the house and me on the business), we suddenly have a lot more time!!

Here is my first attempt at cable knitting. The sock is nearly done, just the rest of the foot and the toe to finish up. The cables are like magic, so fun, and amazingly easy! Another brilliant engineering feet. I mean feat.

I'm so ridiculously proud of these!!

kind of bedraggled after 6 weeks of rain, but here's our second little garden in Belfast...and one gardener picking dinner salad greens!

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse.

Last year in the summertime we took a little "mini-cruise" out to some nearby islands to see puffin colonies, which have been brought back from the brink of extinction in the area (due to excessive hunting in the late 1800's) very successfully by a lot of hardworking men and women. On the way home, we passed by the Pemaquid Light, and we both wanted to see it. So on one of the first sunny days of the summer, a bit over a week ago, we took a picnic lunch and soaked up some much needed sun rays on the weathered rocks at this lovely, albeit very very crowded, spot.

the waiting game

We survived and are even smiling! And Penny magically turned her head, again, at the last minute.

Now we are just waiting for the sale to come along...we both hope someone will love this house and take good care of it and the land it's on. We may have changed our mind about staying in Maine, but we worked hard (HARD!!) and consistently with love (tinged only slightly with frustration at times) knowing that it was our good work that would someday sell this and send us home.

We've learned so much on the way. :-)

I'm glad we came.

again, a little more trim work was done before marketing, but here's a general sense of the essentially finished product...you can scroll back in time to see the way it looked last year this time or nearly....

These photos were taken in February before our trip south. There are a few things I notice that aren't done yet in this photo that now are...mainly some trim around the dishwasher (which we bought for resale purposes) and some crown moulding at the ceiling that we put up about a week before listing the house. This kitchen has been a real treat for us to complete. Not only does it beat doing dishes in a five gallon drywall mud bucket (hey, I did that for 6 months straight! I feel qualified to say! It also beats cooking on top of two saw horses with a leftover sheet of plywood from the attic sheathing!!). I still feel delighted to cook here every day!

This is also shawn's second set of kitchen cabinets...his third set will be a charm as he'll have two previous trials to have gained knowledge from. The next kitchen we're going to try our hands at glass fronted cabinet doors, which both of us have admired. We'll do mortise and tenon framing for that project...that's a ways down the road...have to sell this house first, get home, find land, build, and then we'll see!!

Here's a finished kitchen photo...It was worth it to wait. We custom built the cabinets from the floor up. The cabinet doors are made from edge and center bead (v-match). We used this on the ceilings, too. They are glued and then clamped together, primed, painted, etc. We used no plywood whatsoever in any of the kitchen, not liking the material and wanting to get away from it. The hardware we ordered from Lee Valley, still our favorite source for finish wear...Oh how we miss Vancouver!! :-)

The butcher block top came out beautifully. It was incredibly heavy and delivered in two pieces, one 8 feet long and one 12 feet long. Considering that our combined body weight is about 250 pounds (GO VEGGIE POWER!) we felt quite mischievous after hauling it in (through the snow, by God!). We stained it using John Boos mystery oil. The natural shine and depth of the maple is quite lovely. And the windows with all the wonderful light we will certainly do again in our next home. It'll be wonderful to stay next time around!!