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| How I spent my fall vacation |
In the annals of
the Epistle, this could be the shortest one yet. I had a couple of friends joke
about the fact that the only reason I work on projects is to have something to
write about at the end of the month. I sure hope it isn’t true.
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| Janice landscaping |
For the past 10 weeks, for all intents and purposes, we could have been locked up in a warehouse in Tanzania and not know the difference. My face has rarely been more than 12 inches from a piece of Travertine I have been laying and Janice has been gardening up a storm. In fact, she has done more landscaping than we did in the 20 years we were here. We have had few opportunities to visit friends and have done no sightseeing. It is not the purpose of our returning home this year.
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| Tiling one of two bath/ showers |
This has all been about “reclaiming our home”, both for our use in the years to come, and to garner additional income as a vacation rental during our absence. The good news is that it is working. The price we are paying is heavy for us little people. Not just financial but the work load we have taken on is monumental. Since last month, we decide that we would add a little more coverage in new areas so we got an additional 2000 pounds of stone (900 kilos) for a total of 5 tons (4,500 kilos)
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| Master bath / shower finished |
I am not
complaining here, just reporting what we have decided and are doing. We are on
a self-imposed incredibly tight schedule (Xmas being 9 days away with the kids
arriving) and as I write this we haven’t a stick of furniture in the house. We
are incredibly close to having many things done but again, nothing “done” yet.
This is not meant to be a drama scene where we drag things out to the very end
and finally pull it off. It is a genuine “we may not be able to pull this off”.
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| Master vanity and vessel sink on "rainforest"counter top |
We feel that we will not have everything ready as we would have liked, but it will be a respectable achievement nevertheless. It should be fine.
The next deadline looming is January 9th. That is the day I am scheduled for surgery to do a partial knee replacement. The doctors have finally convinced Janice that I am not faking and trying to shirk the work needing to be done around here. I have been told that for regular men a few weeks are necessary for recovery. I figure a few days of lollygagging around are probably all that will be required. Then, we should finally have time to catch up with friends before we fly out on January 30th to return to France.
