Catching up

I thought I'd post a couple of pictures from the beautiful flowers in the yard. Once again our yard is a show stopper - people take walks down the road by our house just to stop and admire the tulips and daffodils. Some neighbors a few doors uphill from us put a deck on their house last summer and told us that they did it just so they could watch our backyard bloom while they drank their morning coffee each day! :) I'm just pleased as punch because this is the first year that we can smell the lilac blooming from inside the house. To think we planted it the week of the wedding... :D



We haven't been very good about updating this, but since a few people wanted to see pictures of the ongoing wine cellar project, this is the best place I know to post them. For those not in the know, when our house was built it was originally a florist, the building was dug out into the side of a slight hill and the natural cool temperatures from dirt insulation were augmented by cooling equipment. Fast forward some decades and the shop is now the basement and the room that was created to be the coolest is the place we store our wine. It holds about 55 degrees year round, but fluctuates more than we'd like. It also has no real useful shelving for the wine storage. We made a few cubes and bought a wine bottle storage rack, but they were all filled up fairly quickly since we only had room for about 40 bottles. So after the coldest part of winter was done, but before the heat of summer sets in, we're gutting the two rooms and making it into a real wine cellar. (Shout out to Brian for buying Brett that very, very helpful "How and why to build a wine cellar" book.) We started the project during spring break, vastly underestimating the amount of time it would take for demo, but are making headway on it now that the demo is done. As you can see the pictures the old room was put together by someone who might've been a little OCD when it comes to nailing - and goodness knows there wasn't a screw in sight! That would be too easy.

Currently the walls are down and the studs are up. We opened up what had been two small rooms into one large room (9'x9') and should be finishing the wiring tomorrow and starting with the insulation. We're pretty excited because we found out that the room was already keeping a fairly steady temperature with very minimal insulation and when it's done right, the room should be pretty close to exactly perfect for what we need. After it's insulated and the drywall is down we'll add flooring and finally get to start on shelves. But the main thing is that we can get the wine back into the room as soon as the walls are up. Yay! I'll keep posting as there are picture-worthy milestones.

Happy spring all.