Stairs, lights, and rugs - oh my!

While I was out of town on a shopping trip with my sister, Chris got stairs up! They’ve got the construction treads on them still as we don’t have the wood cut for the finished treads, but oh! How awesome to be able to carry boxes up and down stairs instead of a ladder. It’s the little things in life, ya know?

One stringer up and starting the landing

And we have stairs!

Future closet under stairs

The cat loves them by the way. She’s going to be very disappointed when we put the back on them. We won’t leave them open simply because we need the storage space and that’s a very deep closet-to-be. Too bad, as I kind of like the look. But when you build on a slab and give up all that awesome basement storage, you quickly realize that inside storage is at a premium.

Cat staring through stairs - her new favorite activity

Some other stuff that we’ve been up to:

Put shelves in the freezer storage closet off the pantry. So I’m making great progress in unpacking all my cooking gear.

Shelves to left go all the way to floor

Set up a new chrome shelving unit in the kitchen that’s much prettier than the plastic one we had there. Plus it’s bigger – useful and good looking! The other storage units are being set up in the future upstairs bathroom which is going to be a temporary storage space.

Easy assembly

All filled up

Put up a new kitchen light in the middle of the room. Went down to IKEA to buy some functional/pretty stuff like living room rugs and the aforementioned light. Okay, I managed to buy some other stuff too, but since they’re not installed yet, you’ll just have to wait for another post.

A very subtle new light

Not so subtle rugs

 And here's a sneak peak at our bathroom sink design:

Sink parts

 Makes a lot more sense when it's assembled...

Rough assembly

We dry-fitted it to make sure we liked it and to make sure we had all the pieces we needed. Turns out we needed some unions that would allow the last pipes fit together properly. So the test run was a success in that it pointed out we needed to do a bit more work. The sink is white porcelain and will sit in the center; on either side will be a slab of wood that we finish with a marine varnish for durability. I think it's going to look awesome.

We’re also doing road maintenance. Mud season is upon us and we’ve sustained quite a bit of damage from truck traffic. So the road needs to be smoothed and new fill brought in. We’re also going to put down some landscaping fabric (or something similar) to help create a water barrier.

They're even worse than they look here

 So that’s latest. Spring is finally coming and all the outdoor tasks start as well. Looking forward to doing some light gardening and building a stone patio.