One Step Forward . . .

. . . and two steps back. You know the song. Everybody sing!

First, the good news. The stain on the kitchen doorway is fixed!!! It's all pretty and even. I still need to put one more coat on the whole doorway and a second on the board that caused all of the problems, but it's fixed and it's beautiful and I didn't ruin our house. Such a relief.

And I finished staining the window frame!!! We'll prime and paint the windows themselves this weekend, and then we can have our window put back together! Isn't it pretty and glossy? Lessons learned from all of this? (1) Don't rely on your sketchy memory of the brief lesson in staining that your father gave you a decade ago. Look at the directions on the can of stain, and if you have any more questions, look it up. (2) Don't try to eke every last drop of stain out of the can. Take your cheap butt to the store and buy a new can of stain when the old one starts to get gloppy. (I know we could probably just add lacquer thinner to the old can, but as simple as that sounds, I'm pretty sure that that's a learning curve I don't want to mess with. And I just got my nails done).

Which brings us to the bad news. You would think with having already stained the large doorway and the built-in, I would have figured out how to stain by now, but that turns out to not be the case. Once again, please note how glossy both the window and the doorway look. Now please notice how the finish on the large doorway does not have any gloss to it at all. Yeah, different finishes. That's kind of a problem. We used the same exact product on all the wood, but I changed my application method which has resulted in a glossy finish in some places and a satin finish in others. Both mr. flyskim and I like the glossy finish better, so that means in order to match the finish throughout the dining room, we have to sand down the two largest and most time consuming pieces in the room, the large doorway and the built-in, and apply a few new coats of stain. (If anyone who reads this actually knows what they're doing refinishing wood, please don't hurt yourself too badly laughing at me.)

A lot of the blogs that I've been lurking on for the past several years (scared yet?) often post pictures of their wonderful and delicious looking meals, so I thought I'd take a page from that book and show you our dinner (so monkey see, but I don't care). Fish sticks!!! Actually, these are last week's fish sticks, but we had them again tonight. They were both yummy and convenient. Come fall, I promise to do something much more impressive food-wise, but our kitchen gets direct sun in the afternoon, and the quicker I can put something together and get out of the kitchen, the better.

My (Former) Best Friend's Wedding

I was internet stalking a formerly close friend at lunch today, and I discovered that she and her long-time boyfriend got married a couple of months ago. I got all nostalgic because I was supposed to have been her maid of honor, and she was supposed to have been mine. Unfortunately, about six months before I got married (please see photo above), we had a major falling out over flea control for my cats. I'm not kidding. And it's probably for the best that we continue to have no contact with one another.

But all things aside, I'd like to wish a heartfelt (although a little belated) congratulations to the recently married Mr. and Mrs. Duffield. I tuly wish you a long and wonderful life together.

Don't Do This at Home

-or-

How Not To Apply Wood Stain

We had a small setback on staining the kitchen doorway this past weekend. The picture to the right is the doorway in it's halfway corrected stage, and it will stay this way until this weekend. So, what when wrong? I tried to fix a problem with half set stain and ended up with some pretty horrific blotchy areas on the top portion of the right side of the doorway. The left side was looking so nice that I got a little overconfident. Combine that with a desperate need to be done with something (anything), and there lies the path to big, giant FAIL.

After I finished crying and had a glass of wine, I calmed down a little. A little. So on Saturday, I'll finish lifting some of the color off the bottom of the right side of the doorway, re-sand and re-stain. It will look pretty. It will! (Insert foot stamp here.)

Which means that there has been no knitting or sewing here in the last several days. But you know where there has been some sewing? At my sister-in-law's house. About a month ago, she asked me how hard it would be to make curtains, and two weeks ago, I taught her how to use my sewing machine and talked her through some simple panel curtains. She's been going gangbusters ever since.

Neither Quick Nor Easy

But so is the way of progress. Finally. Since the weather started to cool off, I've dived back into the staining of the wood. Right now, there is only one coat on the window frame and on the doorway, but that's 20% done! At least with these two items. I'm anticipating that both the window and door will be done by the end of the weekend.

There's a white strip in the left-hand window frame (that's not a picture of it, so don't worry if you can't see it), and we can't figure out if this was just a non-stainable wood filler or if somebody decided to fill the crack in the wood with plaster. Don't laugh. We've already had to chip plenty of plaster out of the kitchen door frame, so it's a definite possibility. There was also some flexible caulk like what you would use on a tub or a sink filling a larger crack in the frame. I'd like to call these creative solutions, but the part of me that's got a stick up my ass is still a little stunned that anyone would cut a corner like that with such a beautiful piece of wood. Anyway, I haven't figured out what to do about the white vein in the frame, but the lazy part of me that thinks I'm too rigid has seriously considered using nail polish. What this really tells me is that I have a bit of research to do before addressing this problem because I strongly suspect that beauty products are not the answer.

Here's a picture of mr. flyskim (left) starting the kitchen door at the header. We stopped after this piece was done to remove the last of the paint from the cracks where the parts of the doorway were joined. On the right is the doorway with its first coat of stain completed. When both the window frame and the doorway are done, I can prime and paint the windows themselves. We'll probably also make a trip to Rejuvenation Hardware this weekend to pick up new window rope and weights and new hardware. It'll be a joy to have both of the double hung windows in proper working order. We've been propping the left one open with a volume of Shakespeare's collected works almost since we bought the house three years ago.

And even though the heat officially broke a week ago, it didn't become really livable until yesterday. Over the weekend, it was still all belly, all the time. That, and looks of pure misery and hatred because, you know, the hot weather was all our faults. But now that everyone has cooled off, things are getting back to normal with the exception of a slight escalation in the ongoing kitty domination war to make up for lost time.