OMG we have a garage door

On the spectrum of posts that I put on this blog, there are some pretty piddly ones. I painted something, I screwed a vent cover into the wall (wait, there's one of those in this post...), I planted tomatoes that are producing the most miniature of all pink brandywines ever seen on planet earth (this is actually happening and it's super sad). 

This is not one of those posts. No, my friends, this is the post where I tell you that WE FINALLY GOT A GARAGE DOOR!!!! GAH. It was installed today and it opens and it closes and we have garage door clickers for our cars. It's also super smooth and quiet.

If you have been reading for a very long time and have a questionable level of confidence in our abilities to finish what we started, you might remember that our garage hole looked like this when we bought our house. Well, technically the people who lost the house took their tarp with them, so we just had a big hole. NOT ANYMORE!!

Here's another big accomplishment. We had this attic access in the upstairs bathroom and mulled over for months how to fill the hole. Finally, I measured and ordered a big cabinet from Home Depot (which repaid all my spending over the years by giving my credit card to criminals...thanks a lot, guys. I digress.) Then I spent a few months mulling over how to secure it while leaving the attic semi-accessible. So, a semi-permanent installation. Sometimes I work slowly.

Two weekends ago, I cobbled something together using a few leftover hunks of 2x12 I've had for about two and a half years, just waiting for the right project (packratting pays off) and a lot of 3-inch screws. A lot. It is fairly level, but since the walls are kind of goofy, a lot of caulk is also going to be required to finish this one off. 

Here it is trimmed out. I primed it this evening but my phone died so I didn't take any pictures of the primed door. It's ok; not perfect but decidedly better than a gaping hole into the untamed frontier of the attic. After much consideration, I decided it'd be better to just frame the whole thing with casing instead of trying to do baseboard around the bottom. I'm not a great finish carpenter.

Ok, now, about that vent I screwed into the wall. This was actually kind of a pain and I felt pretty clever after I was successful. In the guest room, the drywall doesn't extend enough around the vent cover to give much to sink a screw into, so I had to drill through what I believe to be a flange around the register behind the drywall. I tested my little theory and was met with (rare) success. Now we don't have to warn guests anymore that if they hear a loud crash right next to their heads at night, don't worry, it was probably just the vent cover falling off.

The other attic door that'd been haunting me is also headed toward being finished. I added the decorative shaker-style trim to this door and have been slowly working on the mud to finish the drywall patch we added above it. You may remember before that it looked like this. I primed this tonight too but it needs more wood filler and sanding before I can paint it. The mud needs to be finished before priming, painting and then installing casing.

And now for fun, a few shots from Dancin near Jacksonville.  

Pretty decent wine and great flatbreads. Nice way to spend a Friday night.

Tune in next time to hear about the other REALLY BIG project that we're finishing!