Day One-fifty-two: five month anniversary eve

This was a banner week. On Monday we had the granite guy come out to create a template for the countertop in our kitchen and on Friday a team of guys installed it. Aside from loving the color and taking a huge step on one of the remaining big jobs, we now have our final working sink in place.

As for our other current projects, well sometimes you need to clear the decks before you can take a step forward, right? The exterior of our front door didn't match the beauty of the inside, so we sanded it down to bare wood and will be working on it in the next few days to take advantage of some gorgeous weather. Every project goes better with the right tools, and a power sander saved about day's worth of effort getting who knows how many coats of stain off. Of course, we hit on the sander idea after we'd already spent a day or more relying on elbow grease. We're learners, but not always quick learners.

Slightly bigger, but about the same level of mess, we've also decided to accelerate our plans to renovate the basement. There are two good reasons for this (at least we think they're good). First, we never liked the little "bonus" room that a previous owner carved out of the main area, so we're going to remove walls to create a more open, contiguous space. Second, a funky odor in the basement has bedeviled us, so we decided to discard all of the old paneling and sheetrock (dating to the 1980s or possibly older). The tools for this job are a trusty hammer, a pry-bar, an oversized screwdriver to wedge between things, and lots of manual labor.

Taking down the framing and wall behind where the wood burning stove used to be revealed a surprise that could be part of the smell--seems water used to come down the chimney (that we have sealed up) because it carried soot back down in a liquid form that ran down the wall.