Houston, we have mold

This morning the plumber came to bury the pipes into the wall. That went pretty smooth and it took him only 1 hour to finish. If it had been me, probably 8 hours and 4 trips to Home Depot. So emboldened by the progress, we decided to do a little demo with the help from one of our friends. That went easy until we took off the 2nd wall cabinet and discovered (gasp!!) mold. I don't think it is too bad, but the problem is now the entire floor must come up because we do not know how far it has spread. To make matters worse, the 1st layer of linoleum is at least 40 years old and the backing is a type of burlap. So of course that compounds the mold problem. On the other side of the wall is a shower, so now this gives us something else to do, like we really need that.

Payback

A few months ago I went to visit my brother. If you remember he came out here in July and helped out tiling my kitchen and a few other projects. Below are the pictures of what we did to his kitchen. We tiled his back-splash and gave the tired cabinets a face-lift. We went non-stop for three days from 8 am to 9pm to finish before I had to leave. In the end it looks really great.

I could not leave out the photos I took of his dogs.

This is Bella and Abby in the background. Bella carries big sticks around and wants you to throw them. Yes, that is a 3 foot long 4x4 she carries around.

This is Abby, she has diabetes and requires daily shots. She is also blind due to the diabetes.

Tonka, the golden that must have narcolepsy. I have never seen a dog that is more relaxed than her.
Nan (short for Nantucket) she is a 150lbs Newfoundland.

Kitchen hood

So Friday we installed our stainless steel hood. This is pretty much the final (big) touch to finish the kitchen. We have smaller ones like the curtain and base molding. I had our electrician and his worker help me install it. It was a two or three person job since the main part of the hood is around 50 or 60 pounds. It took two people to hold it steady and one person to mark the holes.

I was concerned that I would have to make a wider hole since it was not exactly over the oven however it worked perfect. Also I did not have to do any patchwork since the chimney covered the hole. So I thought we were done until Ray (electrician) said that I need to cover the gap in the ceiling because if a mouse ever made it into the ceiling he would probably fall down into the chimney and that would not smell too good. So we took a piece of wood and cut a half moon then I plastered the rest with joint compound.

I got up last weekend and we had fog, however it was contained only to the bottom of the canyon. I thought it looked cool. Unfortunately by the time I got up it had mostly dissipated.

As an added bonus the last photo is of a Red-Tailed Hawk that hangs around the canyon.