I called our plumbing contractor & let him know Tuesday was the last open day to finish up in the house before the floor finishing begins Wednesday & that resulted in two plumbers showing up at lunch time. They spent about an hour & finished the drain plumbing for our two kitchen sinks and hooked up the dishwasher & garbage disposer. They still have to do the water filter & dog bath station in the garage. Also the indirect hot water heater in the basement needs plumbed but all that can be done while the finishing proceeds.

The floor finishing crew arrived at 7:30 AM today & so far the expected snow & freezing rain hasn't reached us. They masked off the closets that were full of all the stuff from our now cleared floors & also taped off our oven cabinet. Their foreman had to leave after an hour to deal with the frozen well pump at his house, so not sure if he will be back today. He & one of his helpers were kind enough to lift our largest uppper cabinet into place & set its base on either side of the cooktop. It is very heavy & I had put sliders underneath so it could slide from the Family room to the kitchen, but they just picked it up & carried it in. Peaches doesn't like the extreme cold we've been having so we got her a coat. Its a litlle big but does the job. Last evening she was frisking around so much, I had trouble getting a good picture.

Its been a full week. I finished the flooring in our "West Wing" and moved on to the Laundry room which I finished Friday. There are still two or three partial strips needed in doorways and at the transition from tile to wood in our big hall.

Thursday was a busy day as our electrician came early to finish the basement lights & hooked up the generator box by the West covered porch. He used a clever approach that involves an outside box to plug the generator into with a breaker on our main panel. there is a sliding metal lock on the main panel that only allows the generator breaker to be turned on when the main breaker is turned off. Wiring this way meets code & only costs around $150-$200. Other electricians bid an isolation device at around $1700-$2000. Our electrician's solution is elegant & fail safe.

When the electrician left, two plumbers arrived & they spent most of the day installing the remainder of our bathroom fixtures upstairs & in the small bathroom. They finished moving the pot filler to its new location and started the hookup of our "dog bath station" in the garage but were waiting for a few parts still & are scheduled to return Monday. The faucett for our jetted tub was a floor model and came mounted on a wooden display shelf. I mounted the shelf for a faucet base at our dog bath station. The bath was intended to be portable & used outside but we are plumbing it into a permanent location. Late in the day, I repaired sheetrock around the pot filler & did the first two layers of mud to cover the repair.

Still have a cold. Still laying Maple flooring in the West bedroom.

I've been slowed by a cold for the last few days, but I'm about 1/2 done with the final West bedroom. As I worked in other rooms, I set aside boards that were covered with black paint. There were quite a few, all good straight wood so I'm using them in this room. Hope to have a few estimates for sanding and finishing our floors soon.

Yesterday I finished up the West hallway then spent quite a while removing all the flooring "culls" I had piled in the remaining bedroom. These were pieces of Maple that were defective in some way, like being 2" wide instead of 2 1/4" or they were damaged during removal from the gym floor, heavily warped, had irregular holes with plugs showing etc. There were about 75 sq ft of them & they didn't take up so much room once neatly stacked in the garage.

I vacuumed the floor, chalked a line, then got a few rows down before quitting early to attend a Christmas program at my grand daughter's middle school. She played the violin & sang. It was quite a good production.

I needed only a few thousand staples to finish but had to buy 10,000 as that was the smallest lot they had. When I opened the box, I found 3 packs of 3,330 so the left overs should be easy to sell on e-Bay when I sell the stapler.

Our siding crew used these 5" x 8" steel inserts for joint flashing behind the beveled siding butted end joints. Supposed to be better than caulking the gaps.(it will take a lot of years to find out) I found a big stack during the clean up but I have already done the leftover siding return for credit. They make great wood scrapers for finishing, so I gave most of them to Jeremy but kept these for myself.

I finished one of the West bedrooms yesterday, then moved to the Kitchen where I cut some more sheetrock out & put in the blocking so the plumber can move the pot filler when he returns. We quit early in order to take Peaches by the vet for a rabies shot, then dropped her off at the kennel for a week of boarding & training while I recover from my surgery.

Spaced out when I got up this morning: I was fasting for my surgery but thought water would be O.K. (I wasn't given a pre-surgery instruction sheet, surgeon just rattled off something about fasting after 8 PM evening before surgery) I drank a couple cups of water from 5:30 AM until we left for Kaiser at 8 AM, so I failed the O.R. Nurse's questioning. She called in the anesthesiologist & my surgeon to decide what to do. At first it sounded as if I would just need my surgery done at 10:00 AM instead of 9:30 AM but they decided it would be safer to reschedule for January 6, 2009. We headed home but stopped at Western Tool where I bought another 10,000 flooring staples, then we picked up Peaches at the kennel. I was starving, so we got some breakfast at Karls Jr.