Homestead Day 59 Sunday 11/19/2017 SNOW DAY!!!!!!

Spent the morning inside our warm home drinking coffee and reading the news from around the world. If you ever want to find out what is really going on in America, you need only read the foreign newspapers. You won’t find this info in the MSM. Had a couple slices of peanut butter toast for breakfast while enjoying life in the snow lane.

We’ve been without kitchen counters since moving here. Bought a $140 piece of counter and began, with great trepidation, cutting it to lengths to fit the cabinets. Every time I have cut counter tops, I am worried sick that I’m going to do it wrong. It is even more worrying that the replacement counter if I screw this up is almost a 200 mile round trip to the Kenai Home Depot. Measured everything, at least, three times before I even put the pencil marks on the counter. After carefully measuring and marking the saw cut line on the back of the counter, I cut the evil thing. You have to cut it from the backside with a special saw blade to avoid having chips in the top. First cut went perfect. Picked up the piece and put it into place. Exact fit!! The second piece, i screwed up just slightly. No one but me and another perfectionist would even notice. Set that piece in place and it fit as planned.

After the counter tops, I went looking for the sink we’d brought up here for the kitchen. It was used with the appearance of being new. That meant I had no template by which to lay out the cut in the counter top. This forced me to put the sink upside down on the counter top and trace the line around it. Of course, if I cut that hole the sink would fall through. More careful measuring and more trepidation ensued. Finally, I committed to making the cut and immediately the jigsaw blade broke. Spent a half hour trying to locate jigsaw blades to no avail. After I gave up, Summer took the search and recruited me back into this likely futile effort. As I was moving boxes around, I found a near new Skil Jigsaw, I’d bought at a garage sale, in it’s case with about 20 blades. Finished the cut and set the sink down into the new hole and it didn’t fit. Spent another half hour nibbling away the counter top to get the damned sink to fit. Success, at last, the sink fits. This called for a celebratory drink…of water. The air is so dry up here that I stay thirsty a lot more than I did in Florida.

Next project was to mount the new faucet on the sink. No problem. After that it was onto the drain lines for the two sinks. Had everything..almost. Searched through my plumbing supplies for awhile trying to salvage this project. No luck. Put what I did have on the bottom of the yet to be installed sink.  We could have used it EXCEPT the drain line coming out of the floor was 2 inch instead of 1 1/2. I had no reducer. The work ended with a whimper instead of a gush.

Dinner was a bit of Lettuce, Tomato, Onion salad piled high with sautéed steak strips. Dessert was a couple of Nutter Butters.