Whaddaya mean it's been seven weeks!

People, it's been a long time in the making, like most of this year, but now we are just an easy weekend away from turning over our finished place to our first renters.  That's right, we have a contract for a ski lease through the winter.  The lease will essentially cover all of our out of pocket costs.  Naturally, we're pretty pleased.  We'll get it back at the beginning of May.

Here are a few pictures and some Witty Commentary.

This is the fireplace and the TV - as if that wasn't obvious.

Stair railing thingy.

One of the first things that we noticed when we saw the place was that it lacked any railing on the stair.  This was approximately the last project we completed.

The wooded wonderfulness that you can buy at Home Desperate

Upstairs bathroom.  The bead board paneling looks even better in person.

We used the bead board to make doors for the downstairs bathroom closet.

When you paint a house all one color it looks a hell of a lot better.

New deck rail that we built together.

When you come round the corner, this is what it looks like.

The laundry room has new electrical, gas line, and appliances.  The floor is still pretty ghetto.

OOOOOOOOH SHINY!

Gregor helping me rebuild the back wall of the laundry room (ants ate the framing).  This was one day before the painting was to begin.

I never gave so much thought to the seasons until this project came along. At Tahoe, the seasons are obvious and they played into whether you could work or even drive to get there. Getting there was its own odyssey approximately every week. Now I know the road in both directions, and where to downshift. We found out that the gas prices are lowered in Tahoe City during the weekdays. We ate in good restaurants and pretty mediocre ones. We camped out in our place when it was little more than a roof, walls, and some crappy doors. It used to stink like smoke, it was covered in stickers, you could literally hear the ants inside the walls, and all the neighbors told us tales of ridiculously bad behavior - like low-life residents chipping golf balls toward the nearby houses, drug deals, and lots of beer bottles in the streets. Essentially every passerby told us they were ecstatic about all the good we were wreaking on the house.