Ooh heaven is a place on earth They say in heaven love comes first We'll make heaven a place on earth Ooh heaven is a place on earthokay, I'm a big dork, everyone knows that, but that's what I've been humming round these parts lately. yeah, heaven is a place on earth...and it's called the cabinhouse! (dork dork dork). it's raining and pouring but we have a fireplace, baseboard and now we even have a dryer! actually, we've had a dryer since september (thanks lauren and keisho!), but this weekend we finally hooked it up. and in doing so, curt and i learned how to move a gas line. and how to call pg&e to relight all of the pilot lights and to double check our connections (thanks for the tip, ma!).

our local store (which we just found out has been there since 1946!!!) has the most amazing group of people who work there. we go in almost every weekend (sometimes more...) and they love to tease us about being their best customers. but we're totally mooching off of them. they are an amazing wealth of knowledge. seriously, if you're even thinking about doing any work on your place, make friends with your local store folk(ie. not home depot...). they've saved us so much money by teaching us how to do stuff on our own. Jose is our plumbing mentor, and here's Richard, the guy in the back. he knows a ton and this weekend we watched him make threads on the pipe we bought. cool....
i can't quite figure out how to explain the following photos, so i'll just put them up and let you be impressed (hehe...):
checking connections with diluted dish soap:
we found this piled up around the water heater. crushed ornaments and old christmas cards from the 80's....kinda creepy.
and now we can wash the clothes we work in...the cabinhouse just got a lot less stinky.

the moulding story continues....on to the next trickiest part. the hallway. brief explanation: the entire kitchen, hallway and back bedroom was covered in wooden paneling. charming in the kitchen, not so much in the bedroom. we ripped it out in the bedroom, painted it white in the kitchen and just sheetrocked straight over it in the hallway. here's the difficult part. we didn't sheetrock straight up to the edge of the doorways. not sure why, but we didn't. anyhoo...so everything was all wonky (again) but my brilliant brilliant favorite german was able to figure it out. oh and that little pint-sized sweat-shirted head? that would be our weekend guest/ mini-assistant.

let's see...where did we leave off? i swear, the lack in posts is not due to a lack in work! it's been busy as usual around here, so busy that i've had trouble keeping up with what we've done. lucky for you, we made a list. see it over on the right side? an updated "done" and "to-do". wow. we've done a lot...

i'll start off with the quick update to our bathroom vanity lamp. the metal was too shiny for the mirror so we painted it to match the wall so it would just disappear. shouldn't someone invent a light that's just there? now fixture required?hmmm. guess that's called sunlight...you read more about the light debacle over here.
the light fixture cause quite a stir, but in the end we're pretty happy with it. gets the job done and is completely unobtrusive in our tiny bathroom (update: we did swap out the bulbs for clear ones and it looks better...).

we continued on with the bathroom revamp. curt went nuts with his new xmas present and cut, sanded and painted baseboard for almost the entire house.
while he busied himself sawing, my anal side came out to play and i painted the caulk lines in between the bathroom tiles. now i hate them much less. kitchen and shower tile are up next. really and truly the easiest face lift. kind of like plucking your eye brows...
next we moved on to the front bedroom. we moved all of the furniture out (flashback!). curt smartly labeled all of the baseboard that he cut before he painted it so it was real easy to put back in place.we got all fancy with the special tools. no smacking dents in our baseboard, thank you very much.

next, on to the front room. we've been avoiding dealing with this room because of the front door. along with all of the charm and potential, our little cabinhouse came chock full of random uneven floors, doors, windows and walls. kind of like the mystery spot in santa cruz. everything's wonky and when we put in our new front door it freaked us out a little bit.but now with all of our expert-style tools, no job is too big. we recycled some of the old moulding that we had saved when we ripped it out and it's perfect (and pretty cool that we were able to use the old stuff). with a little fancy cutting, we didn't even have to move the light switch!
okay, and here's a few look-how-gorgeous-the-weather-is photos...we spent some time with the binoculars we brought back from germany. from our favorite spot you can see san francisco and the bay bridge lined up in front of the golden gate bridge....not bad. oh, and we got a new kitchen table and chairs....soooo much better.

i swear i will be back with updates. gonna try to get it done tonight, but definitely by monday evening. see you then!

and we're back...just in time for the rain storm of the year. lord. thought germany weather was intense. given the short notice, we set up a make-shift work bench for curt's new xmas present (best-girlfriend-ever award, thank you very much).We picked up some primed baseboard (finally decided after much deliberation, not to salvage the baseboard we ripped up. this makes life much much easier), painted it in the basement and voila: fancy pants bathroom!
we've started on the other rooms, should be done by next weekend. easiest and quickest way to make a room look finished. new party trick round here.

but before we got knee deep in baseboard, we decided to finish the bathroom. i've been complaining for a while now that the bathroom light is awful but we've slacked in picking out a vanity light. we finally just snapped and bought the standard $11 model at our favorite hardware store. think we might paint it the same color as the wall so that it disappears...at last i can make myself pretty!

continuing with the lighting theme, we rigged up the lamp that we brought back from curt's grandmother's house in germany. amazingly, it didn't suffer at all from being crammed in my suitcase. we think it's from the 1930's. one of the first things they bought together. pretty gorgeous, non? of course, the photos don't do it justice. the light is kind of unbelievable.
other tidbits from the weekend include:
baking breadhanging coat hooks and a mirrorhanging birdhouses (handmade by curt's cousin, a basketmaker)and rescuing neighborhood dogs who escaped during the thunderstorm