pic dump: hiking, cooking, and renovation

Below: the beef dish ruined by Rachael Ray's awful "Asian" stir-fry sauce:



Next: the downstairs, with its new paint job:



Garbage, including the funky, blue-topped toilet:



Deck work from well over a week ago (things have progressed since this picture):



More of the deck:



The living room before the re-flooring; lots of stuff under the plastic shroud:



The hallway, primed but not yet painted:



Note the accessway to the attic, which friends will remember as having previously been perfectly square. We've got a working ladder now! Hence the new rectangular entrance:



A shot of the kitchen not long after a major sanding and painting operation (note the columns, yet to be installed):



A closer look at the four columns that will help a bit with the load-bearing as well as add a bit of dignity to the upstairs:



Mom and Mr. Jeong (right) and Mr. Park (standing) review the color wheel to select the color scheme for the various rooms:



A shot of Fort Hunt Park in the fall. I've been doing 11-mile walks that incorporate the park's one-mile loop:



Leprous cat humping the tree? Why, no, silly! 'Tis a fungus, and a right healthy one it is! Look well:



A closer look:



The taker of the pictures:



At long last, the headless deer carcass I saw on one of my walks. That thing was huge! Again, I regret not being able to take a picture of the fox that had been gnawing away at one of the ribs. I also wish I'd had a companion who could have stood by the carcass for scale:



NB: The following pics were taken by Dad.

A nice shot of the new floor as laid out in the new dining room. We're all ecstatic about how the new room-- formerly our rickety porch-- is going to look:



This is a shot from inside of the dining room, looking out at both the sliding door exit to the deck (and back yard) as well as the new, gaping access to the kitchen and living room:



Here's a shot from the kitchen toward the living room (note paint job):



A shot that catches the living room's bay window. I think Dad's intent here was to highlight the new color scheme:



A shot taken while standing near the front door, looking toward the back yard:



The funky new bathroom tile upstairs:



Another bathroom shot:



And another:



End of Dad's photos. He found his own digital camera and no longer needs to rely on mine.

Below, some dough for sujaebi. Or is it the White Tree of Gondor? Whatever it is, it looked interesting enough for me to take a shot of it:



I started laughing when I saw the new shower head for the upstairs bathroom, partly because it's so shockingly not my parents' style, but partly because I and the shower head connected instantly. As I wrote on Facebook, the thing looks like a cross between a waffle iron and a space shuttle heat shield tile:



Below: my shot of the kitchen, taken today, shows the very nice cabinet work that's gone up. Mom's not as happy with the kitchen as I thought she'd be; personally, I'm impressed with the job the crew did, but Mom's disappointed with how small the kitchen still is. I had told her, not long after my return from Walla Walla, that she and Dad should have taken advantage of the space left over from the old dining room to expand the kitchen into something of awesome size, but by the time I made my feelings known, plans had already been set in motion.

Truth be told, I agree with Mom about the smallness of the new kitchen, but I also think this problem was avoidable. The parents' own concept was simply to make the old dining room, now empty, into some sort of passageway to the new dining room. It's not a bad idea, and I think Mom will eventually come to terms with her new kitchen, which now looks pretty much like what she tentatively thought she wanted. But as I said before, she's not really into the vision thing. She knows what she doesn't want, but she's the type who doesn't know what she doesn't want until after she sees the semi-finished product. That's obviously problematic when you're renovating: it's usually a good idea to have a clear vision of what you want before you dump a lot of money into something you're not even sure you want.

Meanwhile...



Below, my own shot from near the front door, taken today:



And that's that for the moment. I still need to upload the video of Mom using the pneumatic hammer, but won't do that tonight. Tonight I'll be finishing up here, then facing below-freezing temps in my Big Agnes pup tent, a tent rated as a "three-season shelter," i.e., not for winter use. I think I'm going to wake up to snow tomorrow. The way I see it, this is good training for when I'm back in the Pacific Northwest in early March. Winter won't be over by then, I'm sure.


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