Weekend Update

Hello again, faithful readers!
We weren't sure we'd get our new back door in Week 4, but we sure did after all!  Here's a photo of the dogs enjoying the new door, from the outside.  Now they can watch Mommy and Daddy whether they're inside or out...

The painter came again last week and put a second coat on a few spots, but might still

return because one bit of drywall is not paint-ready yet.  But that's okay, there's still time.

The other, outside-the-kitchen project we started tackling over the weekend, since our monsoon rains have abated for a bit, is cleaning and staining our beautiful fence.  It's quite a procedure.
First, one needs to wet the fence, and luckily that's easily enough done with a hose.

Washed and then Brightener sprayed on, still wet

Then there's a solution to spray on the fence to help it slough off the dry bits of wood.  The solution has to be thoroughly mixed so there are no granules to clog up the sprayer.  Surprising how long that takes to get the chemical into solution, stir, stir, stir.
Spray that on, it looks a little foamy, and you let it sit for 15 minutes.  Then you can either scrub it to loosen the schmutz, and/or pressure wash it off.  We had to do a lot of both yesterday.  That solution is like an exfoliant!  When you scrub, there's black goo stuck to the brush, and it turns a bucket of water nice and black too.

Here's how it looks after it's treated and then dried...

When you pressure wash, it blows some of that wood goo all over you.  Jim looked like he'd been in a losing battle with a pencil sharpener.  We were both soaked and covered in wood fluff.  And any of the wood fluff that went to the ground made this interesting gray puddle under the fence.
BUT, the results are amazing!  I think it's worth all the effort.
After the pressure wash, then you have to spray ANOTHER solution on to adjust the pH of the wood, back to something that will allow the stain to penetrate, I guess.
In a couple days, we will start staining the parts we've finished so far, just a few sections of the fence.
Here are all the fun problems we've encountered:

• Both our outdoor hose faucets (did you know they're called sill cocks? So odd...) are pretty leaky, so Jim is replacing at least one of them with a less leaky one. The other one is so oddly plumbed that we'll call a plumber on that one. 
• The solutions that we mix up are only good for 4 hours, so time is of the essence, gotta work quickly.
• Our borrowed pressure washer tried to scare us -- if there's any air in the line, the washer tries to get starved for water and sounds like it's ready to launch to the moon.  The key is patience; set it back to spray without power to work out any bubbles and try power a little later on when it evens out.
• Like idiots, we built the fence right into the beautiful landscaping in the left corner.  We need to get in there and trim a lot of it so we can actually spray/scrub/pressure wash that corner of the fence. Yay, us.
• Oh, And, one of our hoses had sprung a leak, which Jim cleverly fixed with a cool hose-fixer with clamps, but then the pressure washer was being pissy after that problem was solved.
• And... Mosquitoes.  Musquetors, musquistors, how else did they spell it in Lewis and Clark's journals?  http://www.lewis-clark.org/article/3131  "Musketoe -- a vexatious insect." When the sun set and dusk came on, so did the little flying vampires.  I saw one even biting on a previous bite, as if there were a hole in my arm just ready for any old Joe to come suck my blood.  Varmints.  We lost count as we put Benadryl on each other's bites.

When we'd had enough, we showered and took ourselves to the Great Dane, whereupon delicious beers were enjoyed and I ate the hottest F***cking hot chicken sliders I've ever imagined.  Really tasty, but seriously painful.  Dial it down a few Scoville, willya, Great Dane Jupiter?

More work today, we hope. And then, Monday at 11 a.m. -- CABINETS are set to arrive!  Stay tuned, faithful readers!