We think we got the color right in the Kitchen finally 4/8/2023

I call it green. But it's a really gray green. I don't know, it's one of those colors that is hard to pin down. But it looks warm and homey, so that's why we like it.

And if you zoom in real close to those logs, you'll see she didn't fill the gaps the traditional way, which is: "get it close enough, and then trim it." We might be making a mistake, but we'll see. I think the logs might be done shrinking, so we can get away with putting drywall right up to them. We'll know in about a year. Anyway, I like how the logs seem to disappear into the logs. It is stellar work for a novice (my wife).

Kitchen is starting to come together. Need to paint and then hang some cabinets, the range hood, and I still need a counter top for the kitchen sink. Or we might do plywood countertops just so we can move in, and I'll work on the fine and completely handmade (sawed logs into slabs) oak countertops. I don't know. I'd like to get the oak finished.

Planted some blackberries 4/13/2023

Ok, so you can't see them very well because they are only 3" tall, but there are 20 blackberries under that geotextile fabric. Some friends at church were growing them last summer and we tasted them and they were so big and sweet that we asked about them. They are a thornless cane variety and heavy producer called "freedom", sold by https://www.starkbros.com/products/berry-plants/blackberry-plants/prime-ark-freedom-primocane-blackberry. They dug them up, and potted some extra canes for us, and now they have all put on leaves.

Anyway, we decided to put them in front of the blueberries for now, or maybe forever. We'll have to see how they do. Also, we need to clear out some trees before we can plant stuff anywhere else, and that's not going to happen until next year - after we finish the cabin.

Other garden updates:

• we aren't doing a vegetable garden this year - only taking care of the long-term stuff we've already planted:
  • apples: they blossomed about a week ago. Cross our fingers, maybe we'll get something edible this year. Last year, we almost did - got 3 apples, but they weren't good. Trees are still too young.
  • blueberries: we had a sneaky freeze after they got tricked into blooming. It looks like we'll still get some fruit though.
  • blackberries (noted above)
  • I left the bananas buried under piles of leaves all winter, but then they started shooting out some leaves, so I "un-buried" them to give them some breathing room. All of them had at least one large leaf on them until two weeks ago when we had some crazy wind (and tornados up the road a few miles) - the leaves all got shredded. But now they've all put out more leaves. Looks like they want to do something. I hope they can.

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Good progress on kitchen counter 4/21/2023

We're still sore at the soapstone people who wouldn't sell us a slab big enough for all our counters. Actually, we went through 3-4 slabs before we finally got so frustrated with them telling us "no" that we just said "forget it" to all but a piece big enough for the island. But what are you going to do when you're dealing with the only soapstone dealer in the country who will sell to the public without going through a middle-man?

So we needed counter tops for the rest of the kitchen. I had this oak sitting out back that I didn't know what I was going to do with, so I started measuring it, and it looked like I had enough for the counters, except it was 2.5" thick, and I needed to plane it down to 1.5". Ran it through the planer 14 times, and stacked it up inside so I could work some more on it the next day. A lot of the pieces were 6", 8", and 10" wide. I thought it was going to be beautiful!. But the next day - all of it had started splitting at the ends! Wow! Never seen that before. Didn't think we could use it.

We went and looked at just pine lumber - 2x6 pieces - and bought some. But realized we got "white pine" instead of "SYP" (Southern Yellow Pine). It clashed pretty bad with the closet door and all the other SYP in the house (all the exterior logs are SYP....).

It was pretty depressing to not find what we wanted, and have to do so much work to get there.

The next day, I was sitting around chatting with my wife, and happened to look down at the temporary desk I made for my daughter - just an extra stair tread I made from the same oak that split. Except none of the stair treads have split. My wife loves how the treads turned out. Then I had a light bulb moment - "Hey, wait a minute! Why don't we cut all those slabs that are now splitting into 3" wide strips, and just glue them together like we did the stair treads? We won't get the nice wide slab look, but at least it'll be strong and match the rest of the house." So my wife said I should cut a few strips and see what we think.

And now we are in love with our future kitchen counters. Just giving a sneak peak here, but it's going to turn out really cool.

Oh, by the way - in the pic, we just have all the boards laid out how they should go - not glued together or anything. And they will be pushed back into a "yet-to-be-made" channel in that back log.

Started gluing counter tops 4/25/2023

Started gluing the kitchen counter tonight.

Last night was all about test fitting. We discovered that the last board needed to be supported while test fitting, and when I finally got it supported, we found out we needed another inch to make the whole thing wide enough to hang over the cabinets just a little.

So tonight, I cut a few strips out of scraps I saved, made sure it fit, and wife gave me green light - "glue it!"

We decided to glue just the back three boards for now - this will give us support on the back while we work on the front. It's all going to be held together with glue and biscuit joints, thanks to my neighbor's generosity with his tools....