Breakfast with Blogger Friends, Highlight of the Week

I finally have something to write about other than the work we are doing on the house!

The highlight of this past week was whent we took a few hours off and met a couple of other bloggers for breakfast.

Smiles all around.  Craig, Kate, Russ and Donna. Kate is local and is also in the process of clearing out a house.  Russ and Donna are from Oregon and are "any-timers". They call their rig Therapy because that is what getting away from time to time is for them.

It was very nice to spend a few hours with people who understand what we are doing.  We discussed the stress factors, and the challenges of running up against unexpected delays.  I felt good after being with them.

Now some boring stuff about work on the house.  

In the post that I wrote early Friday morning, I said nothing had gotten finished this week.  But by afternoon I had finished working with the WATCO Danish oil on the kitchen cabinets.  It is amazing what a difference this stuff makes!  Had I known, I would have done this five years ago for myself.

The same cabinet door before and after WATCO.  I used the oil that also has some stain in it.  For the kitchen I used Golden Oak. For the worse scuffs I did dab on some additional stain before using the oil.

One odd thing about this house is that there are six different baseboard and door frame wood treatments.  The place has been remodeled or added onto a couple of times.  For each improvement, different woodwork was used.  Craig has done two of them. The original woodwork is a rough cut wood that was stained with a black oak stain.  It was very common in the 60's and 70's in California.  Much of it has been replaced, but not all, and that which is still up is faded and scuffed.  Craig is in the process of staining new wood for around his new doors and the areas where we are getting new carpeting installed.   If the house lingers on the market, and everything else is done, he may continue replacing the woodwork throughout the rest of the house. Until then I have taken on the project of giving the old black walnut a fresh coat of stain.  

After and Before

WATCO to the rescue. 

 The result is not perfect, it is still the rough cut wood, 
but it's fresher. I'm almost done with it and then I will go back to working on more  doors with the clear restoration oil.


Craig has also been very busy, but his projects are harder to describe and take pictures of.

 So, I will end this post with an image of a recent sunset. We don't see as much of them in summer when the trees are full of leaves.